Observing the buffering properties of a weak acid conjugate base and weak base conjugate acid buffers The

purpose of this lab was to observe the effectiveness of various buffer solutions. This was done in three parts. The first part was a acetic acid acetate buffer titrated with hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, and the second part was a NH3 NH4Cl buffer titrated with the same chemcical solutions. The third part was to observe the pH of a prepared buffer solution versus the theoretical pH, which was supposed to be 5.00. In the first part, when adding HCl to the buffer solution, the excess H+ ions would react with the acetate and form acetic acid. According to the equation pH = pKa log ([HA]/[A]), this would result in a smaller change in pH as opposed to directly changing pH by having no buffer. When adding OH ions, acetic acid would just react to form acetate and water. For the purposes of simplification, the concentrations in the equation could be simplified to just moles, if the volume change is negligible from titration. However, makihng such an assumption would mean that error from the true value would increase as more hydrochloric acid or base is added. The solution was titrated and compared to various values at different milliliters of titration. The average percent error was ____. The second part is the same as the first part, but instead, it is a weak base conjugate acid buffer. Therefore the equation would be pOH = pKb log ([B]/[BH]). Adding excess H ions would cause the pOH to increase, while adding excess OH would cause it to decrease. The same procedure was done as the first part, and the average percent error was _____. The third part involved preparing a pH 5.00 buffer solution by calculating the volumes of acetic acid and sodium acetate solution needed to prepare it. The results were that 40 mL of 0.1 sodium acetate and 10mL of 0.1 HCl solution were needed to prepare it. However, when preparing it actually, the real pH observed was 4.10, leading to a percent error of 20%. This means that there were either excess H ions in the solution, or the pH detector was not properly cleaned, and acid was left on. The biggest source of error must have been the approximation that involved calculating actual pH from using only moles instead of molarity because the percent error sometimes tended to increase a little as more acid or base was added.. This could be fixed, by creating a new procedure that used an even more negligible change in volume, such as adding different molarities of base and acid, instead of consecutively adding acid or base solution to the buffer.