What factors affect the rate of the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide with a fixed mass of catalyst?

P LANNING Aim: Our aim is to detect which factors affect the rate of the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide with a fixed mass of catalyst. A catalyst is a substance, which alters the speed, or rate of a chemical reaction but is chemically unchanged at the end of the reaction. The two factors that we can change are the temperature and the concentration. We chose to vary the concentration of hydrogen peroxide. The catalyst to …

…be more accurate when weighing out the catalyst, timing the experiment and reading out the readings. Instead of changing the concentration, we could have done a weight loss. This would involve weighing the mass of H O + O , and then weighing the mass again about 90 seconds afterwards. By doing this experiment we could have been able to determine whether hydrogen peroxide and a fixed mass of catalyst would decrease or increase its weight after 90 seconds.