What can be a good chemistry extended essay ?

I’ve never written an extended chemistry essay so I’m not entirely sure what all is involved but I was thinking maybe fuel cells? There are a number of different kinds and people are very interested in them these days. The chemistry is pretty interesting.

I need to provide some research and experiment to prove hypotesis that i will make at the beginning, so I have to compare smth, and experiment as i said before is important, to make some conclusion and evaluation

I like what @lillycoyote suggested. You could also consider writing on ‘Diamond’ the hardest of minerals, its structure, bonding, properties. The periodic table is also very interesting, trend of ionization energies, atomic radii. Another topic could be on Solar cells.

“Is it better to use dried animal manure as a fertilizer or as a fuel?”

Can you please @Lightlyseared tell me how to make experiment to see which one is better ?

Compare combustion of said to it’s nitrogen comtent.

@Ayesha diamond isn’t the hardest substance/mineral

@phaedryx diamond is the hardest natural mineral. What are you thinking of that is harder?

@Lightlyseared

Naturally occuring:
wurtzite boron nitride (formed by volcanoes)
lonsdaleite (formed by meteorites)

Man-made: http://www.google.com/search?q=substances+harder+than+diamond

You could talk about the pros and cons of nuclear power. Hot topic at the moment, especially considering the tsunami in Japan. Compare it to coal stations which is also a hot topic at the moment considering “global warming” etc. Nuclear power can be a very clean, safe option but obviously there are risks involved so you could talk about the chemistry side of that.

edit :: although I just read your response about needing to conduct your own experiment. Might be a bit difficult to perform nuclear fission in a classroom lab… however I’m confused as what you mean by “extended essay”. If you are conducting an experiment and providing a hypothesis etc is that not a laboratory report? With method and results and discussion? I don’t know that can become an essay necessarily. An essay, to me, is where you research a topic and use academic journals from other people’s discovery and talk about it and make a conclusion on that. So. Yeah. I guess maybe I’m asking could you please explain more about what it is you are actually doing?

How about talking about the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical clock reaction and its relationship to fractal geometry and the math underlying the behavior of dynamical systems with strange attractors when pushed far from equilibrium? My gosh, the title alone would be a long essay. Read more at this link.

@phaedryx naturally occuring lonsdaleite (moh hardness 7) is a lot less hard than diamond (moh hardness 10). It is thought that this due to imperfections when it is formed in nature. Computer simulated perfcet lonsdaleite (and this is what all your google links were talking about) is thought to be much harder then diamond on avarage but even then a IIa diamond (ie one that is near perfect and devoid of impurities – around 1% of all diamonds found) would still be harder. Naturally occuring wurtzite is again weaker than diamond (admitedly not by much) but the man made stuff is harder than diamond (agian we are going for diamond on average here and just the supper perfect type IIa which still wins).

@phaedryx: Here’s an article that says wurtzite boron nitride (wurtzite is a type of crystal structure) is “manufactured by detonation!” Oh the things you learn at Fluther…

On a related note, a new allotrope of carbon was recently discovered (April 2011). It’s called T-carbon, different from diamond, graphite, & amorphous carbon. It’s not quite as hard as diamond. The article says that T-carbon is formed…

”...by substituting each carbon atom in diamond with a carbon tetrahedron (hence the name “T-carbon”). They were inspired by the substitution of each carbon atom in methane with a carbon tetrahedron, which forms tetrahedrane.
...
“Each unit cell of the T-carbon structure contains two tetrahedrons with eight carbon atoms. As the scientists’ calculations showed, T-carbon is thermodynamically stable at ambient pressure and is a semiconductor. T-carbon is one-third softer than diamond, which is the hardest known natural material. The new carbon allotrope also has a much lower density than diamond, making it “fluffy.”

@shrubbery I need to state research question an hypotesis. Extended essay has a form of a big lab report it include resarch, experimental part, data collecting and processing evaluationd and conculusion. It is like your investigation and you need to investigate and prove smth. for example my budd fromthe class, he investigates the efficiency of the cigarette filter, smth like that. You have to have intereting research question and hypotesis and very available method to do that. So what you think ?