Conclusion

This study aims to find out if the concentration of vinegar would affect the rate of moulding of a cucumber over a period of time. This links to how much vinegar you can possibly add into your achar dish, so as to preserve them according to the number of shelf life days. Majority of the data shows a trend where cucumbers grow more mould when the concentration of vinegar it is placed in is lower. With the set of data obtained, I can conclude that the concentration of vinegar does affect the rate of moulding of cucumbers over a period of time. The higher the concentration of vinegar, the slower the rate of moulding of the cucumber. Therefore, I can prove that the acidity of the vinegar which is manipulated by the concentration of vinegar plays an important role in the preservation of the cucumbers. This finding therefore proves my hypothesis right!

Pictures of Experimental process

Labelling the containers!


Cuttting the cucumbers into slices of about 2.5cm in diameter and 0.3cm in thickness!


Sunning the cucumber pieces for 26 hours!


Covering the setups with clingwrap so as to maintain high humidity for the cucumber and to prevent contamination of other substances from the surroundings during the period of 10 days!

Results of the experiment!

Data One:

Data Two:

Data Three:

Experiment Procedure(:

Step One: Research on the topic of Preservation and Acidity.
Step Two: Using the knife and ruler, cut the Japanese cucumber into 6 slices of about 3cm in diameter and 0.2cm in thickness. Discard slices which are not within the margin of error of 0.1cm.

Step Three: Place each of the 6 slices into the small rounded containers.
Step Four: Leave the slices of cucumbers under the sun and air them for at least 24 hours.
Step Five: Label the 6 containers as different setups, naming them:
Setup A->100% vinegar
-contains 25ml of vinegar and no water
Setup B->80% vinegar
-contains 20ml of vinegar and 5ml of water
Setup C->60% vinegar
-contains 15ml vinegar and 10ml of water
Setup D->40% vinegar
-contains 10ml vinegar and 15ml of water
Setup E->20% vinegar
-contains 5ml vinegar and 20ml of water
Setup F->100% water(control)
-contains 25ml of water and no vinegar

Consultation session with Miss Tan!

During the consultation session, Miss Tan told me to:
-change my experimental setup by having 6 setups instead of 4 setups only!
-repeat this experiment 3 times. Since my consultation session was scheduled on the last day, there was not enough time to repeat this experiment 3 times one after another. Therefore, I was advised to conduct it simultaneously!


Time to repeat my experiments!

First 3 days of experiment.

On the first 3 days of experiment, there has been no change in all the cucumbers! I should just wait for the change in surface of the cucumbers soon enough!

3 set ups

For this Concentration experiment, it was to find out if the concentration of vinegar on cucumbers would affect the amount of growth of mould over a period of time. In the photo above,
set up one(far left):
-has 20ml of vinegar added
-has 5ml of water added
set up two(middle):
-has 10ml of vinegar added
-has 15ml of water added
set up three (far right):
-has 25 ml of water added only

Set up Three is the control of this experiment and thus does not have any vinegar added to it. This allows us to compare the other results to this control results, ensuring that the difference in results is due to the changed variable, the concentration of vinegar added, and not other factors.

Process of adding vinegar

As far as possible, I tried adding vinegar and water to the different set ups as fast as possible. This is so that the amount of time in between the adding of liquids would be decreased, making this experiment more fair.
As you can see from the picture above, I used the same containers for all 3 setups so that there would not be another changed variable.

Adding vinegar to the cucumbers!

I used baking measuring spoons to measure the amount of vinegar needed for teach set up.As seen from the picture above, the upper measuring spoon has a capacity of 15ml while the lower measuring spoon only has a capacity of 5ml.

Measuring diameters of cucumber pieces!

In this picture above, cucumbers were measured to have a diameter of 3cm. This ensures that the amount of exposed surface area of the cucumbers are kept the same in different setups as much as possible.

Getting started with my experiment!

As seen from this picture, I cut the Japanese cucumbers using a ruler so as to make sure that the cucumbers are as similar as possible in diameter of circles and thickness of circles. This is so that there would not be another changed variable, decreasing the chance of this factor affecting the results of this experiment, the amount of growth of mould on the cucumbers! The cucumbers were cut and had a diameter of 3cm and thickness of 0.3cm.

Trial Experiment.

I conducted the trial experiment with 3 pieces of normal sized cucumbers with diameters of about 7.6cm.
Improvement: This experiment can be conducted with Japanese cucumbers instead as Japanese cucumbers are greener and mould (white in colour) can be more easily spotted on green surface as compared to a whiter surface.

This experiment was conducted with white vinegar.
Improvement: Instead of white vinegar, which was usually used for the Achar dish, I decided to use Black vinegar on my final experiment instead as Osmosis which occurs when water molecules of the Black vinegar which has a higher water potential enters the cucumber, which has a lower water potential, the black colour which seeps into the cucumber can be easily spotted and white mould which grows will be very easily identified.

This experiment was conducted with cucumbers placed in containers with lids sealed.
Improvement: I realised that when the lids are sealed, dispersal of mould spores would not be able to reach the cucumbers. This will result in little or no growth of mould on any of the cucumbers. Therefore, I decided to place the containers in the same environment but with lids open.

Besides the points stated above, no other changes were made to my experiment.