Final Reflection

This year of chemistry has been very challenging but I've also learned a lot.  I'm not sure how I can use this knowledge for anything but blowing holes in the ceiling but that's not much of a concern.
I really enjoyed chemistry.  Even if I put off all the blogging until it was a daunting work load.
What I've learned in this high school chemistry class will carry me into other college sciences, (if I even have to take them).  I've thoroughly memorized lab procedures and I'm amazed at how simple loggerpro seems now.
This is my last blog and I don't know if it's much of a reflection but it's all I've got.
I hope future chemistry classes can find my blog even slightly helpful.  Or at the very least amusing.  Let me be a lesson to you all!!!!!

Beer's Law and Acids Lab

 Beer's Law- absorbence is proportional to the concentration of the solution.
Basically, light is absorbed by the solution.  It can be measured to figure out what the concentration of the solution is.
For this lab, we had mystery concentrations of nickel sulfate (NiSO4) in distilled water.  Our goal was to determine how much NiSO4 was in the solution.
To do this we used a Colorimeter, to measure how much light was absorbed by the solution, and hooked it up to a computer in order to graph the measurement of the solutions.  We measured our own concentrations of NiSO4 with distilled water and plotted them on the graph.  Then, we placed samples of the unknown concentrations in the Colorimeter and compared them against the measurements of our controlled, known, concentrations to figure out how much NiSO4 was in the unknown solution.

This is the graph of our controlled solutions.
The measurements we got for the unknown solutions were:
Unknown 1: .115 mol/L
Unknown 2: .365 mol/L
Unknown 3: .26 mol/L

I feel like I'm talking about pokemon.

Acid's Lab

Acid's are substances with a low pH value, meaning they give up H+ atoms.  Base solutions have a high pH number.  If you add an acid to water the acid gives up it's H+ and makes the water more acidic.  Adding a base takes up the H+ from the acid and levels out the water but it can happen kind of fast.
In class we added acid to water and added base in small integrals while we measured it with the computer much like we did with the Beer's Law lab.  Mr. Ludwig also added a chemical that would make the water change color when a base was added but wouldn't interfere with the acid mixture.  I can't remember what it was though...

We kept adding more base, in smaller intervals as the color stayed longer, until we leveled out the acid content of the water and eventually overpowered it with the base.  Water would have a pH content of 7, which is right in the middle of the pH scale and is considered neutral.  Right in the middle of that steep slope is where the 7 is and is the point of neutrality.
Graphing each point as we added more base formed a gradient as the two concentrations merged together.