Wednesday, August 18, 2010

zinc and salt

I think I might have already mentioned it but I'm really interested in using steel in a place which has a history of storing mountains of salt.

In the first week I grabbed a piece of what I thought was steel sheet from the scrap box, covered it in salt, dripped water on it and left it to see what happens. I subsequently found out it was zinc so I just forgot about it.

Then I found it again...



wierd, huh?





Anyone able to give me the chemical formula of what's going on here?

Anyone?

Bubble-Man?
.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey there Ms D.

Looks to me like you're having a pretty good time over there.

I suspect there are two things going on here. First the zinc is going rusty in the water (and not reacting with the salt). I think the second thing that is happening that after you added the water to the salt this would have dissolved some or all of it up. As the water slowly evaporated the salt would have precipitated out into those fluffy snowflake like structures.

See you when you're back in Melbourne. Look forward to hearing your stories.

Tim (aka Bubble man)

Anna Davern said...

Thanks Bubble-man, So zinc does rust? I don't want to wash the fluffy stuff off cos it's so pretty but I want to see what the surface of the metal looks like underneath so I think I'll have to.
A