What is the accepted mass of salt?

Question

Hi, I'm doing a lab for physics class, and I just realized that I do not know the mass of regular iodized table salt. What is the accepted mass of 60 mL of salt?

Answer 1

2.165 g/cm^3

60 mL is 0.06cm^3, so the mass is 0.1299g

Answer 2

Be very careful -- you have a potential problem here.  You cannot use the density of sodium chloride, because your 60 ml sample includes lots of empty space between particles.  The "apparent density" will be significantly lower than the true density of NaCl.

The apparent density is a function of particle size, shape, uniformity, container size & shape, and particle packing arrangement (look up "packing theory").  I would imagine there would be distinct variability among different brands, and perhaps even some variability from batch-to-batch for any one brand.

For this reason, you should determine mass and volume separately for any given sample.