Hi luckycharm,
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First of all I read that Ammonia and Bleach do not go together well and can pose health danger. Please read the link below first:
As a note I have seen on the links above that Ammonia may not be a very good chemical material to play around with.
PLEASE READ THIS LINK BELOW:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A795611
So perhaps after this you may want to substitute those two with something else.
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From your last post it appears that you have actually done the experiment yourself ? That is you have tried cleaning four dirty pennies with lemon juice, bleach, vinegar and ammonia respectively ?
And you have found by experiment that vinegar and ammonia cleans better than lemon juice and bleach.
Well the next step would be first to find out the chemical properties of each of the cleaning agent that you have described above.
Below are some links that might be of interest to you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baking_soda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetic_acid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia
Then you need to figure out what is it that you are cleaning of a dirty penny ? What is the US penny made of ?
Read this link:
http://www.finishing.com/69/98.shtml
Something else you might realize is that the four cleaning agents above have different pH factor. Might this have to do with the ability to clean ?
Which ones are acids and which ones are bases ?
Other links that may be helpful to you:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/science_ex ... caper.html
http://gogk12.optics.ucf.edu/Fellow%20D ... ctions.doc
