Science Research Project

[cobra]

I have to do a science fair soon and write up the procedure and background info.. I have been thinking of topics, but I don't know how to further develop them so that they could be more than just extractions or something of that sort. These are 3 topic choices that I could do a research project on...

 

Caffeine

Vitamin C

 

I can do the extractions.. but from there, what can I do with caffeine extract, or Vit C extract that would make it be labeled a "Science Fair Project" or that I could further do research on.

 

If anyone can help, or suggest topics to work on, that would be greatly appreciated.. I need ALOT of help. Thanks.

 

Also, if something research-y can be done with Cleaning agents other than testing how effective it is, what could I do with that?

[ajb]

For my A-level chemistry (10 years ago now!) I did a short project on the effects of heating solutions with vitamin-c. I showed that the concentration of vitamin-c decreases the longer we heat the solution. I used solutions made up from vitamin-c pills.

 

I forget exactly how I did this, but it involves a lot of titration.

 

The overall conclusion was that cooking food reduces the vitamin-c concentration and to reduce this you should cook food for the shortest time possible.

[insane_alien]

everything involves lots of titrations. good thing is that you get really really quick and accurate with them. finding the vitamin C levels in various orange juices(freshly squeezed by you in the lab, whole orange juice and diluting juice) isalways a good one.

[cobra]

Wow, I really like the idea with the heat.... And, well, if you were to do the experiment, would you just use time on heating mantle as the independent variable, and well control the amount of Vitamin C, and amount of solvent there is for it? Also, would you ahve to make sure that the temperature is constant for the mantle in order to use it every time? What would be the easiest way to approach the heating part of this experiment? Also, suppose a fruit or vegetable was used.. If a green pepper was used instead of vit-c tablets, how could I come about doing that? Would i have to extract Vit C, or crush up the green pepper in solution, heat it, and then titrate the extract from green pepper (after filtering the extract out from green pepper..) What do you think??

 

ANd thanks for the help