Chemistry Lab Report Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Chemistry - Lab Report Example 31). Since acids and bases readily react with each other, it is experimentally quite easy to find the amount of acid in a solution by determining how many moles of base are required to neutralize it. This operation is called titration, and you should already be familiar with it from your work in the Laboratory (Harris 2006, Pg. 06). We can titrate an acid with a base, or a base with an acid. The substance whose concentration we are determining is the substance being titrated; the substance we are adding in measured amounts is the titrant. The idea is to add titrant until the solution has been exactly neutralized; at this point, the number of moles of titrant added tells us the concentration of base (or acid) in the solution being titrated (Harris 2006, Pg. 8). In this schematic reaction, base1 is conjugate to acid1, and acid2 is conjugate to base2. The term conjugate means â€Å"connected with†, the implication being that any species and its conjugate species are related by the gain or loss of one proton. The Arrhenius view of an acid is a substance that dissociates in water to produce a hydrogen ion. There is a serious problem with this, however: the hydrogen ion is no more than a proton, a bare nucleus. Although it carries only a single unit of positive charge, this charge is concentrated into a volume of space that is only about a hundred-millionth as large as the volume occupied by the smallest atom. Owing to its extremely small size, the proton will be attracted to any part of a nearby atom or molecule in which there is an excess of negative charge. Such places exist on any atom that possesses non-bonding electrons, and here that protons attach themselves to the acceptor atom by forming a shared-electron (coordinate) bond with the lone pair (Silbey 2006, Pg. 42). Interestingly, experiments indicate that the proton does not stick to a single H2 O molecule, but changes