Literature Review

In this literary review of this science project, we will mention four different aspects of our science project. These aspects are the historical development of the field, the key ideas and important terms, the key issues and controversies, and the future of the field. This review will go over these different aspects of our project in order to give you a better understanding of what we are attempting to do.

Our project has very little history. However, we were able to find a message in a web forum that employed a strategy similar to ours to make the water conduct electricity. Here are a few parts of the project report we found interesting for future reference:

“We consulted an electrical engineer friend who said we might not have enough voltage from 2 D batteries of 1.5 volts each, 3 volts total. He suggested we get a 6 volt battery OR change the project to compare salt water vs. plain water as conductors.  First we tried the 2 D batteries with salt water. It still did not conduct the electricity to light the bulb, but it did make an interesting bubbling effect and turned the water yellow. It also seemed to burn the copper wires.”

This grade 7 mother was trying to experiment on the conductivity of water vs. ice. Unfortunately, neither water nor ice conducted electricity, so her friend gave her the helpful tip of adding salt to the water. This is exactly what we want to do except in more detail by adding a larger variety of materials to the water. Apart from this, there is very little historical development we could find that is related to our project.

In this project as in every project, there are several ideas, key terms, guidelines, tools, etc. that will help us do this project. Here is a list of those thing accompanied by a short explanation of what they mean. This is a sort of “vocabulary” to refer to during our project. The source of our electricity will be either AC or DC power and will, of course, be referred to as the source. Then, there will be the wiring that will lead to the lightbulb. This wiring will be conventional copper wiring (could change type of wire…not a permeanent decision). It will be referred to as the “solid” wiring. The pure water, on its own, will only conduct a very small amount of electricity (not enough to light the bulb). A combination of this water and the material added to it will be referred to as the “liquid” wiring. Then there will be the light bulb. This bulb will be a conventional 60 watt bulb (may change as above…). It will be referred to as the terminal. These materials, used accordingly to the independent variables that we have set, will be our science project.

The key issues and controversies are very minimal in this field. There is, however, one issue in this project. It is a very vague project in that it has not really been attempted in the past. We are, in a way, pionneers for this project. Success is not guaranteed, and the procedure could go wrong in many ways. For example, There could be a short-circuit when we insert the wires into the water, the result indicated in the quote above could happen again (although we intend to use AC power), there could be no result whatsoever. A multitude of things could go wrong but the adventure of this project is one of the reasons we chose it over all our other options.

The future of the field is very unclear. Since this project has probably never been explored as deeply as this, we do not know what our project could lead to in the future. However, we did find an interesting concept on the net:

“When a certain substance is dissolved in liquid and if the liquid thus obtained can conduct electricity, such a liquid is called an electrolyte solution, and the dissolved substance is called an electrolyte.”

There was also another web resource that mentioned that one of the methods for discovering the salinity of water is to see how conductive it is: the more conductive the water is, the more salt there must be in the water.