Hypothesis

I hypothesize that the crystals will bloom on the sponges. I believe this because when I observed ammonia and salt, I noticed that it formed crystals. If you use ammonia with salt, it makes a solid crystal. If you use all of the ingredients you can form a crystal garden.

Review of Literature

Crystals are not alive but they can grow because in crystals, atoms and molecules join together in a pattern that repeats itself over and over to create a certain shape. To make artificial crystals, your solution needs to be supersaturated. This means that to have more solute entities (or molecules) dissolved than it would contain under the equilibrium (saturates solution). This can happen by using various methods (example: Solution cooling. I’ll explain later in the paper.).

You can also produce and purify your own crystals. If you want to produce your own crystals, you could do the same thing I did or a different project like a salt garden.

Crystal growing is an art and there are as many variations to the basic crystal growing recipes, as there are crystallographers. Here are some excellent ways to grow crystals. The slow evaporation method is the easiest way to grow crystals, and it works best with compounds that are not sensitive to conditions in the laboratory. Slow cooling is a good solute-solvent system, which is less than moderately soluble, and the solvents boiling point is less than 100° C (How Crystals Form)

The way you handle crystals is important to the size and how fragile the crystals are. For example, if you rapidly shake your jar or pan, as opposed to letting them grown undisturbed, your crystals will break. Look at the crystals once per day and per the solution and (do whatever you have to do to them either in the morning or at night). The crystal structure is only as good as the crystals used for data collection.

Crystallization is preceded by nucleation, which happens either very, very quickly or because of vibrations or particles. If nucleation happens too quickly, there will be too many small crystals and not enough big ones.

You should never use the sublimation method because it does not give you that many high-quality crystals. Also sublimation takes place at really high temperatures, which means there is a lot of energy in the core of the crystal when they form. In addition, crystals are growing too fast when they are obtained by sublimation which can cause twining

(Wikipedia: Crystal) The nature of a crystallization process is governed by both thermodynamic and kinetic factors, which can make it highly changeable and difficult to control. Factors such as the impurity or level, mixing regime vessels, design and cooling profile can have a huge impact on size, number and shape of crystals produced. Now, put yourself in the place of a molecule within a pure and perfect crystal being heated by an outside source at some very high and already determined temperature, the complicated architecture of the crystal collapses to that of a liquid.

Well-formed crystals are expected to be pure because each molecule or ion must fit perfectly into the lattice, as it leaves the solution. Impurities would normally not fit as well in the lattice and, therefore, stay in the solution preferentially. Hence molecular the recognition of the principle of purification is crystallization; however, there are very few instances when impurities incorporate into the lattice, alas decreasing the level of purity of the final crystal (Wikipedia: Crystal)

Materials

• 3 clean, dry sponges
• Aluminum pie plate or cake pan
• Glass measuring cup
• 0.06 liters table salt
• 0.06 liters of water
• 0.06 liters laundry bluing
• 30 milliliters of household ammonia
• Mixing bowl
• Metal spoon
• Blue and green food coloring

Method of Procedure

1. Begin by mixing 2 tablespoons of salt with 4 tablespoons of water, stirring to dissolve as much salt as possible.
2. Next, you add 2 tablespoons each of ammonia and laundry bluing, again mix as you go. The mixture will be a blue, watery sludge.
3. Now, pour the sludge, liquid and extra salt on top of your porous substrate in the plastic dish. All salt items may not go in the solution; this is okay as long as your pour the extra salt on top of the items in the dish.
4. If you want colored crystals, then you could add your favorite color of food coloring. I picked blue, red and green. But only add 2 or 3 drops.
5. Allow the container to sit in the atmosphere overnight by the next day. Crystals should have bloomed and you can keep your garden in bloom by adding 2 or more tablespoons of salt on the second day, I then added half batches of the whole mixture from time to time. Make sure to pour the mixture into the base of the container and not on top of the crystals or else they will dissolve. If that happens, you will have to start all over again, which is still fun to do.
6. If you keep adding the mixture into it, then your garden will bloom forever!

My crystal garden is formed by salt after the water and ammonia evaporate away. The ammonia speeds up the evaporation process. The laundry bluing helps to form crystal blooms instead of crystal chunks. The bluing solution is actually a colloidal suspension. It has small particles that will not dissolve but are held up and separated by the liquid as the water evaporates away. The salt forms crystals using the colloidal particles as a seed or nucleus for growth. The liquid mixture and the salt are pulled away from the bottom of the container up to the top of the sponges by capillary action, almost the same way water spreads through a sponge.

Results

Conclusion

In conclusion, I proved my hypothesis was correct. You can grow crystals on dead organisms, but you could also do it on other surfaces because I even grew some on my counter. How the crystals bloom has to do with liquid bluing. liquid has particles in it that would not dissolve, thus, causing the crystals to rise and bloom every time I added more solution.