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osmosis
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I have been asked to investigate how a manufacturer of frozen chips could increase their profit margin. I have been told that frozen chips are sold by weight, therefore I have to find a way to increase a frozen chips weight without increasing the manufacturing cost by any significant amount. One way to do this would be to increase the concentration of water within the potato chips. I have investigated what scientific information might be useful and found that water can diffuse across a potatoes membrane from a dilute solution to a more concentrated solution by a process called osmosis. According to Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 98, osmosis is ôThe flow of water by diffusion through a differently permeable membrane from areas of high water concentration to areas of low water concentration. The diagram below shows this: To get heavier potato chips, the water has to enter the potato chips through osmosis. All plant cell membranes are differentially permeable, which means that they will allow some substances through and not others. Water can freely penetrate all membranes. Using this information we know that we can increase the weight of a potato chip through osmosis, however we want to maximise the increase in weight, so we have to consider what factors affect the rate of osmosis. One factor is the water concentration of the solution you add to the potato chip. When a substance, such as sugar, dissolves in water, the sugar molecules attract water molecules and combine with them. The water molecules now combined with sugar molecules are no longer free to move and so the effective concentration of free water molecules in this solution has been reduced. The more sugar molecules there are in a solution, the more water molecules will be ôtied upö. In other words, the more concentrated a solution is, the fewer free water molecules it will contain. The two diagrams below show this: The diagram below shows a dilute sugar solution separated from a concentrated sugar solution by a thin membrane. The membrane prevents the solutions mixing freely but allows individual water molecules and sugar molecules to pass through. There are free water molecules on the left than on the right and so the water molecules will pass more rapidly through the membrane from the left to the right than from the right to the left.
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