ChemCollective Virtual Chemistry Laboratory

This gives you the opportunity to carry out chemistry experiments in an interactive online laboratory.

Unlike many simulations, you are not simply watching an experiment or changing a few variables. You can select chemicals and laboratory apparatus, prepare and mix solutions, transfer measured volumes, investigate pH and concentrations, heat solutions and use your results to solve chemical problems.

The laboratory can be particularly useful for developing the link between chemical calculations and practical chemistry. Activities include solution preparation and dilution, stoichiometry, limiting reagents, acids and bases, titrations, equilibrium, thermochemistry, solubility and redox chemistry.

If this is your first visit, watch the short introductory video below before opening the laboratory.
It demonstrates the main controls and will make the Virtual Lab much easier to use.

Standardisation of NaOH with KHP – Acid–Base Titration
Excellent introduction to the Virtual Lab and directly relevant to volumetric analysis.
Determining Stoichiometric Coefficients
Students experimentally determine how unknown substances react and deduce the balanced equation. There is also an autograded version.
Creating a Buffer Solution
Particularly good Year 2 work: students have to design a buffer with specified properties rather than merely calculate its pH.
Unknown Acid and Base Problem — students produce titration curves to determine the pKa values and concentrations of an unknown acid and base.
Open Unknown Acid and Base Problem
Heats of Reaction – Hess’ Law — investigates three related reactions involving NaOH and HCl to demonstrate Hess’s law.
Open Heats of Reaction – Hess’ Law
Cobalt Chloride and Le Chatelier’s Principle — students perturb the cobalt equilibrium and observe the response. ChemCollective rates this as moderate difficulty and suitable for high-school/introductory and first-year undergraduate chemistry.
Open Cobalt Chloride and Le Chatelier’s Principle
Kinetics of the Persulfate–Iodide Clock Reaction — this is one of ChemCollective’s newer additions and is particularly relevant to A-level rates work.
Open Persulfate–Iodide Clock Reaction