HOW DIFFERENT TEMPERATURES AFFECT THE RATE OF DIFFUSION OF A DYE INTO A FLOWERBy: Ximena Cruz, Silvana Rivas, Kathy Galdamez and Julio Butter.

WHAT ARE WE SEARCHING FOR? We want to find out which dye is absorbed

quicker by the flower. Plus we are searching for the specific heat

capacity of each dye.

VARIABLES Control Variables:

INDEPENDENT VARIABLE

DEPENDENT VARIABLE

OUR METHOD

ROOM TEMPERATURE1) Pour 1 ml of red colorant into the beaker

2) Measure the temperature of the dye

3) Put in the flower and immediately start the stopwatch

4) Repeat the steps for the green and blue dye

5) Stop the stopwatch once you see the color is abundant in the petals

1°C TEMPERATURE(Decrease the temperature using ice)1) Measure 100ml of red colorant and pour it into a

beaker

2) Pour ice in the beaker until it is filled (usually 3 ice cubes used)

3) Measure the temperature

4) Repeat steps with blue and green dye

5) Once the beakers have reached 1°C in temperature, put the flowers into the beaker and start the stop watches

HEATED TEMPERATURE (90°C)1) Repeat steps 1-3 from room

temperature method

2) Prepare bunsen burner and take the temperature of the dyes

3) Using a thermometer, heat the red dye with the flower until it reaches 90°

4) Repeat steps 1-3 but with different dyes

RESULTS

Temperature (+/- 1°C)

Time (+/- 1min)

Total time taken for absorbtion

Blue Dye Red Dye Green Dye

120 22 17

59

2568 90 62

220

9037 - -

37

Total time of absortion (mins)

125 112 79

GRAPH

1 2 30

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Low temp Room Temp

CONCLUSION: HIGH TEMPERATURE When temperature rose to 90°C the only flower

that changed was the one in blue dye. The sepals of all the flowers looked brown around the edges. The blue color dye has low specific heat capacity and this causes it to gain energy faster and rise the temperature. So molecules have more energy making it easier to diffuse into the flower against the dying rate the flower has. Red and green have a high heat capacity so it could not diffuse fast enough so the flower became denatured by the time the color dye was diffusing and could not absorb the color.

CONCLUSION: LOW TEMPERATURE The first dye absorbed by the flower was the green

one, followed by the blue and red. As we are mixing ice(water) with dyes, it makes

the diffusion procedure to be easier. We found out that cold temperatures are optimum temperature for flowers to absorb.

The reason for these is that we believe that the molecules of the green dyes are smaller than the blue and the red.

Given that in low temperature molecules have less energy for them to move, as it has a smaller surface area it uses less heat therefore it needs less heat to move, making it to diffuse in a faster rate.

EVALUATION When heating the temperature, we set the

limit to high by letting rise to 90°C, we should have done a lower temperature like 70°C because then the flower could have actually survived and absorb the dyes easierly. This would have made it easy to compare the heated flower with the room temperature and the low temperature flowers.

Another problem was that we cut the stems to late. Given that we saw it didn’t absorbed the dye quickly with 20cm, we then cut it to 10cm but we should have done it from the start.

EVALUATION The tubes of the bunsen burners were not

well adjust and this cause the table to catch fire which violated the safety measures.

Instead of using pink roses it would have been better to use white roses to see if the effect of colouring the dyes took the same time in diffusing as it did with the white carnations.

PICTURES http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=85

852&id=503107557&saved