Big Manny’s Displacement experiement

Displacement experiment

Watch Big Manny’s displacement experiment as he shows the science practical using magnesium, copper and iron sulphate.

What is displacement?

Displacement is defined to be the change in position of an object.

Big Manny’s Displacement experiment with magnesium, copper and iron sulphate

Here I have three different metals, I have some magnesium metal, some copper and some zinc. Magnesium is the most reactive of all of them, so it’s able to displace the other metals when they’re in their compounds.

In the displacement process, how does copper sulphate react when mixed with magnesium metal? 

For example, I have some copper sulphate here and we’re going to add some magnesium metal to the copper sulphate to see what happens.

Straight away we can see a lot of bubbling and fizzing taking place, and some effervescence. The reason why is because the magnesium is more reactive than the copper, so it’s able to displace the copper metal in copper sulphate to form magnesium sulphate.

As the magnesium sulphate is being formed the copper is being precipitated out of the solution and we can see some brown solid form there and that’s the solid copper metal that is being displaced.

Now I have some magnesium sulphate. I’m going to add some copper to the magnesium sulphate and see if the reaction takes place.

In the displacement process, how does copper react when mixed with the magnesium sulphate?

Let’s put the copper in the magnesium sulphate. Right so we can see that there is no reaction taking place between the magnesium sulphate and the copper metal, and the reason why is because copper is less reactive than magnesium, so it’s unable to displace magnesium and magnesium sulphate, so that’s why no reaction occurs.

In the displacement process, how does zinc metal react when mixed with the iron sulphate?

Here I have some iron sulphate, I’m going to add some zinc metal to the iron sulphate and see what happens. We could see a few bubbles being formed here to build effervescence. Now the reason why we can see bubbles is because the zinc metal is displaced in the iron, in iron sulphate that forms zinc sulfate and that’s because zinc is more reactive than the iron.

What is the reactivity series in Big Manny’s Displacement experiment? 

Big Manny’s Displacement experiment highlights that all of these metals can be organised according to their reactivity, this is known as the reactivity series. So the most reactive is magnesium, followed by zinc and then iron and lastly we have copper.

Found Big Manny’s Displacement experiment useful? Watch more from Big Manny on the Oxford Revise YouTube Channel.

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