A titration is a process used to determine the volume of a solution needed to react with a given amount of another substance. In this experiment we titrated a hydrochloric acid solution, with a basic sodium hydroxide solution. The concentration of the NaOH solution was given and we had to determine the unknown concentration of HCL. The hydrogen ions from the HCL react with hydroxide ions from the NaOH in a one-to-one ratio to produce water in the overall reaction.
When the HCL solution is titrated with the NaOH solution, the pH of the acidic solution is initially low. As we added the base the change in pH rises gradually until it gets close to the equivalency point when equimolar amounts of acid and base have been mixed. Near the equivalence point, the pH increases very rapidly. Then the pH rises more gradually before leveling off with the addition of excess base.
In this experiment we used a pH sensor to monitor the pH as NaOH solution was added to the HCL solution. We also used a drop counter to monitor how much of the NaOH was being added to the HCl solution. Since both the pH probe and the drop counter were plugged in to the lab quest, we were able to record the rise in pH as the NaOH was added.
For this lab we were not able to retrieve any data. We failed to retrieve the data because of faulty equipment. The lab quest that we used in this experiment wouldn’t record the data correctly. We attempted the experiment three separate times,
