I’ll be drying the silver out and weighing it sometime in the next couple days. Closest guess when I do gets bragging rights! (And absolutely nothing else)
The scale was zeroed with the beaker empty, and it contains only water and silver (and a trace amount of copper nitrate). If you have a strategy behind your guess, please do share it!
What? Why? I’m kind of sure that this is wrong (subtracting (water + silver) from silver can’t get you water, you could get (silver - water) at best) but I’m interested in the reasoning here because it short circuit my brain.
I’ll walk through it again, as you are probably right, and I can find the mistake.
1800g is the estimate weight of 450
gml silver powder.The total weight is 1464g.
There is 250ml (g) of water at the top of the container, which we subtract from the total weight, leaving 1214g of a silver/water slurry.
1800g should be the weight
1214g is the weight.
(Here is the mistake) The weight difference is 516g, which is the weight of the missing silver in the slurry, not the weight of the water in the slurry.
So, I would need to convert 516g to an approximate volume of silver powder. Since we have volume, we can now compute the weight of the water in the slurry.
Ok I think I see what you’re doing, but it’s still wrong tho. Going, kind of, that way would be:
volume of water = total_volume (silver_mass - slurry_mass) / (silver_mass - water_mass); where silver mass and water mass are the masses of the total volume if it were only that substance alone, ie (volume * density).
With this method you can use the volume of a block of silver instead of powder, which would be more exact as there’s air within powdered silver–you can add a bit of water to powdered silver before the volume start to rise–, and also the total volume and mass of the content of the beaker without taking out the water on top.
Sorry if it’s not very clear, I’m finishing my lunch break, I can explain/elaborate when I get home.
Btw I’ve checked my math: 844.4 g silver + 619.6 g water = 1464 g total; 844.4 g silver/ 10.5 gr/cm3 = 80.4 ml silver; 80.4 ml silver + 619.6 ml water = 700 ml total.