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Lab Report On Osmosis

Decent Essays

In this lab, we performed two experiments to understand the process of osmosis and its relationship with solute concentration, and how water potential is affected by temperature. In the first part of our lab (there was no hypothesis for this experiment), where we used dialysis tubing to model osmosis and its relationship to solute concentrations, we observed how the percent change in mass increased as the solute concentration of the solution did. The percent change in mass was positive, meaning that the dialysis tubing had gained mass after being submerged in the distilled water solution. This means that the dialysis tubing gained water, which was the result of osmosis. The water diffused from outside the tubing, through the semipermeable membrane, into the tubing in all of the cases. Because we know that water diffuses from high water concentration to low water concentration, we know that the sucrose solutions in the dialysis tubing had less water concentration than the distilled water surrounding the tubing. Furthermore, the molarity of the sucrose solutions inside the tubing increased from 0.2M to 1.0M, which means that the sucrose (solute) concentration was increasing, so the water concentration was decreasing. This explains why the percent change in mass increased as the molarity increased; more water was flowing into the tubing as the water concentration got lower and solute concentration got higher. In other words, the water was flowing from a hypotonic solution to a

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