Acid Base Titration Report

January 2015

Internal Assessment
MODELLING THE ACID-BASE TITRATION EXPERIMENTAL DATA

KRIŠTOF FORTUNA
Mathematics HL
Candidate number: 000562-0007

Candidate declaration: I confirm that this work is my own work and is the final version. I have acknowledged each use of the words or ideas of another person, whether written, oral or visual.
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INTRODUCTION
When conducting an acid-base titration experiment in my chemistry class I came across an interesting shape of points plotted on the graph. I had never seen such a shape before and wanted to know more about it. Because I am very interested in chemistry as well as in mathematics, I thought that connecting the two subjects might be interesting. That is the reason for my decision on the topic for my mathematical exploration.
From chemical standpoint, the acid-base titration is one of the most common laboratory techniques in which an acid of unknown strength is titrated against a solution of a base, or vice versa, in order

There are two constraints that we need to take into account when dealing with the titration experiment. pH can never be less than 0 or more than 14 (0 ≤ pH ≤ 14), and the volume of NaOH-added is always a non-negative number (V(NaOH-added)≥0).
In my exploration, I will attempt to model the data from the chemical experiment called an acid-base titration.

MAIN BODY
The measurements of the experiment are provided in the table below.
V(NaOH) was added with the accuracy of ± 0, 10 ml, and pH was measured with the accuracy of ± 0, 2.
V(NaOH-added) [ml] pH V(NaOH-added) [ml] pH

Table 1: Experimental data from the titration experiment

Now I need to plot these points on the graph in order to be able to model them afterwards. pH is plotted on the y-axis and V(NaOH-added) is plotted on the x-axis. For plotting the graph and further investigation I used a computer program