Question

discuss one or more practical (experimental) ways in which you could determine whether a sample of ice has been transformed into a metal

Answer 1

When Ice cube Melts they can Turn into single atom metals

Certain reactions – like the one between silver nitrate and sodium chloride – produce insoluble solids that precipitate. Often, this process is undesirable as it creates large and irregular clumps of solids. Nano Particles which are metal Catalysts of Smaller & fine grain particles are more efficient for this process.

Experiment Analysis:

1) We have two bottles, one is solution A, the other solution B, and we mix the two solutions by stirring.

2) This creates high local concentrations of one reagent and can cause uncontrolled precipitation. A workaround is to add one solution to the other drop by drop. Still, each droplet contains huge numbers of molecules.

3) Then freeze one of the solutions in water and drop the ice cube into the other solution, which is kept at just above 0°C. Reagent release from the ice cube is so slow that formation of nuclei tiny particles that can aggregate and grow in uncontrolled manner is suppressed, which allowed to make single metal atoms.

4) We can try on eleven transition metals, including copper, silver, gold, platinum and ruthenium, by adding a metal salt ice cube to a reducing agent solution. As the ice cube releases fewer than five metal cations per nm² per second, the metals can’t nucleate and precipitate. Instead, the cations get reduced one by one, and remain as isolated atoms stabilised by the surrounding water molecules.

5) The captured the metal atoms on carbon sheets and Visual them with scanning tunnelling microscope.so that we can get different results for different transition metals .