Nails rusting science project

A. Hi, Mike. If you have a boat, or a model boat, or a fishing reel, you might be concerned about whether it is necessary to wash it after you've taken it to a fresh water lake or a salt water bay. If you have an overheating car you might wonder whether to carry a jug of fresh water, salt water, or purified water to top up the radiator. If you have steam or hot water heating in your home, you might wonder what kind of water is best to put in it. You can think of more.

Regards,

A. Hi, Kasandra. You should describe your methodology, and that can take a lot of words. By that I mean: how big were the bowls; where did you get the nails and what do you know about them, if anything; did you do the experiment indoors, and what was the approximate temperature. Where does your tap water come from; how much salt did you put in the salt water; were the jars covered or open. Did you attempt to clean the nails first with sandpaper, or detergent of anything?

Then there are observations: Did you look at the nails at all between the start of the experiment and the time you removed them from the jars? If so, what did you see? Could you smell the vinegar or lemon juice? Did the Sprite appear to go flat over time? Did you arrive at any conclusions? Did you do any research? 5 pages isn't too much to describe in detail everything you did, saw, and learned. Good luck.

Regards,

A. Hi, Alexa. I would not worry about the title being too long, but I would be worried about it being worded too strongly. For example, there might be a dozen things that remove rust better than anything you will try (probably some of them are too toxic for a 7th grade science project). "The Effectiveness of Some Household Liquids Towards Rust Removal" might be a more modest title.

If you are looking for resources, you really should be at a library, and the librarian will probably be glad to help. But if you and your teacher are satisfied relying on the far less reliable and credible internet, what's wrong with the page you're looking at?  :-)

Regards,

A. Hi, Jill. I've never been in education and it's been decades since my boys were in 3rd grade, so I'm not sure I have a good feel for what 3rd-grade level is :-)

A librarian or teacher would probably be a lot better at it than me. Plus, although I think Poppy Anne is right, I've never researched it and don't know it for a fact. So I don't want to concoct a 3rd grade level analogy to explain something that may only be urban legend in the first place.

Regards,

A. C'mon, Mike. I just finished answering that to the best of my ability. When you get an assignment to do a book report, do you read the book or do you call the author and say "What's your book about?" :-)

I'm really not trying to be mean or difficult, but teachers write to us asking us to "just tell the students to do their own homework". Asking me a question when you've looked hard and can't seem to find an answer is fine; but when the answer is already on the page, I'd be doing a disservice to your science education to pretend it isn't :-)

Regards and good luck,

A. Hi, Rollin.

The corrosion is probably going to be too little for her to be able to measure the weight change with a scale, or impractical depending on your daughter's age and the equipment available at the school. So you are going to proceed according to your "qualitative" feel for the amount of rust. It is obviously difficult to turn qualitative feel into real "quantitative" data -- so take a lesson from TV commercials on how to "sort of" do it. One commercial claims that their product "reduces the appearance of fine lines by 78%" . . . really, what does that even mean? They simply invented their own scale, and that's what you need to do :-)

Don't beat yourself up, just give it a shot. I'd probably either go by the percentage of the surface covered by rust, or by rubbing any rust off the nails onto a coffee filter and estimating the relative darkness or size of the rust stains on the filter.

Then you can pick the rustiest one and say the next rustiest seemed to have about 50% (or whatever) as much rust, the next had 25% as much rust or whatever, and the best preserved had no rust. Now you have numbers that you can chart.

Hint: the oil covered steel parts in an engine do not rust significantly or an engine wouldn't work very well. Good luck.

Regards,

A. Hi, Nick. First, what is your level of confidence that your results are right, and not a fluke that happened due to some small random thing? If you are not positive that your results were right, you certainly don't want to double-down and compound the problem by offering a scientific sounding explanation that makes you twice as wrong :-)

Did you repeat the experiment multiple times and always get the identical result? if yes, reread this thread, paying attention to why acids are used in industry.

Regards,

A. Hi, Susana

Stainless steel is a special alloy of chrome, nickel, and iron carefully designed so it won't rust. Galvanized nails are coated with a layer of zinc in order to deter rust. Unfortunately, neither of those nails are helpful for your test. See if you can get your parents to find "bright finish" nails or "masonry nails" (these look more like long flat skinny wedges than nails). Use some sandpaper on the nails to try to scrape off any finish that might remain, and then they should be in a condition where they can rust fast. Good luck.

Regards,

A. Hi, Alex.

Corrosion is any chemical reaction of the nails with the environment. Instead of having a steel nail or brass nail or aluminum nail, you now have a nail where some of the metal is gone and has been converted to a metal oxide or other corrosion product. Rusting is similar but is restricted to steel because rust is defined as iron oxide. Even pure water will cause rust because one of the mechanisms is the dissolved air (rich in oxygen) reacting with the steel (iron) of the nail to form iron oxide. I'm obviously not looking at your nails, but perhaps the one in bleach could be described as "pitted"?

Regards,

A. Hi, Dolly.

You need numbers in order to graph anything. What numbers, if any, do you have? Give us those numbers and we'll try to help you graph them. If you have no numbers yet (most people probably don't), what results do you have? Maybe I can help you figure out how to put those results into numbers in order to graph them.

Regards,