I'm home schooled and did this experiment with copper plating. I mixed salt and vinegar together in a container with a lid and put 50 pennies in it, left it to sit there for 4 hours. Then I came back and distributed an even amount of the copper solution into 3 containers. Container 1 had a zinc nail. Container 2 had an iron nail, and Container 3 had aluminum foil. So, I did this experiment, but nothing happened.. What would be the result of this logically?Thanks.
Putting pennies in a container with vinegar and salt will clean copper oxide off the surface by the reaction CuO + 2 CH3COOH ---> Cu(CH3COO)2 + H2O. Copper is very low on the activity series of metals, so the dissolved copper ions should have plated all three of the other metals. The copper ions should take electrons from the metals to produce metallic copper and ions of the metal being plated. (For instance, Zn + Cu(CH3COO)2 --> Cu + Zn(CH3COO)2.) So what went wrong? * If any of the pennies you used were made in 1982 or later, they're actually mostly zinc with a thin plate of copper over it. If one of these newer pennies had a tiny spot of exposed zinc under the plating, the copper ions would have reacted with the zinc to re-plate the pennies. Instead of copper ions, your solution will contain only zinc ions. * If they were shiny pennies (regardless of when they were made), there would have been very little copper oxide to react. With very little copper ions in the solution, the plating that happened with the other metals would be very hard to see. If either of these was true, try again using only pennies from 1981 or earlier - they will be made almost entirely out of copper. And make sure they're dark rather than shiny.
Electrolysis - look up electrolytic purication of copper. As for zinc, just dipping it into a solution of a copper salt will plate it, but probably not as well as you wuld like - the copper tends to fall off.
