How can you determine the atomic mass of an unknown metal if you know its density and the dimension of its unit cell? Explain.
The formula relating density and atomic mass is given below: D=a3Zm or m=ZDa3 ....(1) Here, D= density, Z= number of atoms per unit cell, m= mass of an atom and a= edge length Also, m=NAM ....(2) Here, m is the mass of an atom, M is the atomic mass (mass of 1 mole of atoms) and NA is the Avogadro's number. Thus, we can determine the atomic mass of an unknown metal if we know its density and the dimension of its unit cell. Note: If all three edge lengths of the unit cell are same, we can use equation 1. However, if they are different, we can substitute a3 for a×b×c in equation (1).
