Carly+M

Carly McGlade Pd 8 A lot of people like to eat rock candy and yet they never think about where it’s come from or what it is. This science fair project about sugar crystals and how their growth is effected by their cooling rate is a new topic to many people. A lot of research had to be done to help out with learning the background, materials, and information on how to do this project. While searching for the background of this project you can learn a large amount of things. Doing this project won’t actually involve making rock candy so much as just pure sugar crystals. Rock candy is actually just a bunch of sugar crystals grown together. The shapes that rock candy forms just reflects the growth of the sugar crystals. To know how to describe these sugar crystals for the project, research on crystalline structure and the shapes of crystals was needed. Crystal shape and crystalline structure is basically the same thing. Some of these shapes and structures include cubic, tetragonal, triclinic, hexagonal, monoclinic, and orthorhombic. These shapes and structures aren’t exactly what they say either, even though you may think so, just because it’s cubic doesn’t mean it’s a cube. A lot of crystals that are described as cubic are octahedrons or even dodecahedrons. This idea may be hard to grasp, thinking about it on one level, because you may not have known that crystals have axises. This would probably be easier to see at a high magnification. Seeing these sugar crystals at a high magnification could be achieved my using an electromagnetic spectrometer. If the want or need for this device were there for this project I could add it to my materials list, since it is readily available at school. Other materials that would be used in this science project can be found in “Growing Crystals,” a previous similar experiment. Materials that were found from the site or specifically needed for this project would be about fifty or sixty clear cups, one stove, four cooking pots, water, about four bags of table sugar (sucrose), one freezer, and one inside countertop, one outside countertop, a refrigerator, and a stopwatch. Knowing these materials ahead of time will certainly help the process of the project go a lot quicker and easier. Information to help carry out this project is also needed. Things like this could be what to do if a situation doesn’t go as planned and knowing how exactly to precede things each and every trial. The information used to help with this can be found in “What is sugar?” and “Crystal Science Fair Projects – Rock Candy Project.” They say; to create these sugar crystals as equally as possible, always use the same amount of sugar with the same amount of water. This may take a while to figure out because there might not be enough saturated solution. To create this saturated solution all you have to do is keep adding more and more sugar. The sugar should stop being added to the water when there is enough sugar that it isn’t dissolving anymore. If you don’t do this then the crystals won’t grow, there needs to be seeds that the sugar crystals can grow from. And you also should make sure that your sugar is table sugar (sucrose). If it is not sucrose then it will just become smooth and there with be no forming of any desirable sugar crystals. But before any of this project is even started, there must be a hypothesis. To create the hypothesis, research was done on what previous trials and experiments have come up with. In the experiments written about in “What is sugar?” and “The major Rock Types and how they form” it is a pretty unanimous decision when saying, the faster the crystal cools, the smaller the crystal. This makes complete sense, because if something has more time to grow (cool in this case) then it will grow larger, but if it doesn’t it will certainly be smaller than something that hasn’t had that equal amount of time to grow (cool). So in this experiment, it would be considered a good thing to have a larger crystal. Having a larger crystal will be good because it will be easier to see how, if this detailed enough, the crystals from different cooling temperatures are, not just the simple, larger than or smaller than. So my hypothesis would be something like, if the saturated solution cools slower, the crystal will be greater and easier to see intricate details, because it will get the chance to grow. Doing the research for this science experiment on growing crystals has helped to learn a lot. This information will help with writing the scientific paper and actually, physically doing the experiment. The research will also contribute to having to deal with fewer “road blocks” along the way and just to simply having a greater knowledge of it all.

Works Cited Crystal Project.” Goodsearch. 2. October 6, 2009. [] [] [] sugar crystals classification.” Google. 1. October 6, 2009. [] October 6, 2009. [] Goodsearch.2.October 6, 2009. [] Goodsearch. 2. October 6, 2009. [] [] [] 2009. []
 * 1) Clear Science Fair Projects. “Crystal Science Fair Projects – Rock Candy
 * 1) “Crystalline Structures.” Google. 5. October 6, 2009.
 * 1) “Growing Crystals.” Goodsearch. 2. October 6, 2009.
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 * 1) Kiwi Web. “How do crystals form and how do they grow?” Goodsearch. 1.
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 * 1) Morris J., Paul. “The major Rock Types and how they form.” December 30, 2000.
 * 1) The Accidental Scientist. “recipe: Rock Candy.” Goodsearch. 2. October 6, 2009.
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 * Cooling area(temp.) || trial #1 || trial #2 || trial #3 || trial #4 || trial #5 || trial # 6 || trial #7 ||
 * Room ||
 * Refrigerator ||
 * Freezer ||
 * Hot light ||