How do you increase surface area (Chemical reaction)?

1 Answer
David Drayer
May 2, 2018

Powered or crush the solid reactants. The smaller crystals have a larger ratio of surface area to mass than the larger crystals.

Explanation:

Making the reactants smaller in size increases the surface area for the same mass of the reactants.

A simple experiment is to place different sizes of sugar into room temperature liquid, Place the same mass of sugar in different forms into the same volume of room temperature water.. Use Sugar cubes, granulated sugar, and powered sugar, as independent variable. measure the length of time for the sugar to disappear into solution as the dependent variable.

Crushing or decreasing the size of the particles of the reactants will increase the surface area and speed the rate of the reaction.

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