Identifying Metals

You have a summer internship working in a jewelry laboratory where your job is to explore the properties of some alloys of silver, rhodium and platinum in order to make brighter jewels at a lower cost.

One day, while preparing an alloy, you accidentally left the bottles near the melting furnace and the labels became charred and unreadable. OH NO! You now have three unlabeled bottles of metallic powder. Your task is to design and perform experiments to identify the metals in these bottles. From a chemical handbook available in your lab, you find that the densities of silver, rhodium and platinum are 10.5, 12.4 and 21.45 grams per cubic centimetre, respectively.

Now perform your experiments using the Virtual Lab.

Note: The solution information panel for this activity only displays approximate values for the volume of a substance. Please design your experiment based upon how you would solve this problem in a physical lab.