Lab Activity: Limiting Reagents

This baking soda and vinegar balloon experiment yielded some interesting results. Those results are below, along with some pictures. The limiting reactant as you can see is the baking soda and in the reaction the baking soda would run out first. Due to this the less baking soda you have, the less of the product their will be. You can see this demonstrated as the volume of the balloon grows from 6.5 inches (1 gram of baking soda), to 11.5 inches (2.5 grams), and finally to 14 inches (4 grams). Also, if 12 grams of iron rusts you will get 17.2 grams of Fe2O3. I solved this by converting to moles, dividing by 2, then converting back to grams. Lastly, the concept of limiting and excess reagents can be applied to construction companies where they need to determine how much of each material they need for building and which materials they have less or more of.