Class Lab: Hydrophilic to Hydrophobic

03/25/15

What is the difference between hydrophobic, and hydrophilic? Hydrophilic is a concept where an item likes water. Meaning it will allow water to dissolve itself. Hydrophobic is a concept where the item doesn't like water. It repeals it off. Today our teacher announcement that we will be making sand turn into hydrophobic. Sand is not hydrophobic, it sinks in the water. By making sand hydrophobic, we would be making sand float on today of water.
First we started by getting the equipment we need.
Materials                      Ingredients
Glass Tray                    Reptile Sand
Glass Stir Rod              Water
1 glove                         Silicone Spray

Then we got reptile sand and put them in the glass tray. We sprayed it 6 times, while mixing it together each time we put a new layer of spray on it. Then we let it dry in the sun a few seconds. We then added water into the sand, and to our sight the sand was floating! Kind of. Some of the sand was not floating because there wasn't enough silicone spray. But the other half of the sand was floating. On the picture you see on the right is that when I tilted the tray to an angle, the water and sand made it seem like it has wrinkles. It was fun to play around with it.

This activity went really well, no one was struggling in this experiment. Everyone asked questions if something wasn't clear. What I learned in this experiment was see how sharing bonds work in action. Just by mixing these ingredients together I could see a visual on what the teacher was talking about, and I had a clearer view on what shared bonds mean.

Here is a video on when we poured water to the sand. The water had an interesting effect to the sand when they touched.