Acids and Bases

Acids and Bases are one of the few areas of chemistry that virtually everyone knows about. We all know about bleach and drain cleaner and everyone has been warned at some point about battery acid. Even movies commonly contain vats of boiling acids that turn ordinary people into superheroes or super-villians.

What most people don’t know is that acids and bases are also involved in the tartness of a fresh apple and the bitterness of a piece of dark chocolate. In fact acids and bases surround us and influence virtually everything. Let’s dive in.

We’ll first need to know what acids and bases are. We’ll look at three different definitions of acids and bases. In that process we’ll discuss how we identify acids and bases and the types of reactions that acids and bases undergo. In the midst of that discussion, we’ll need to discuss amphoteric compounds and the auto-ionization of water. We’ll also look at the idea of pH (as well as the mathematical definition of pH) and how that plays into the difference between acid and acidic, base and basic.

Next we’ll look at how acids and bases work in the context of equilibrium. That will involve understanding the difference between strong and weak acids and bases, and determining the pH of solutions made of strong and weak acids and bases. 

We’ll spend some time looking at titration (one of the ways to determine the concentration of a solution). Specifically, we'll look at the purpose and the math associated with it. In that discussion, we’ll also make sure that we’ve looked at how those calculations change with polyprotic acids and bases.

Then we’ll tie several of these ideas together by looking at how pH changes during a titration. We’ll look at both the mathematics of this process and at the graphical representation of that process. We’ll compare titration involving strong acids and bases with those using weak acids or weak bases (again, both mathematically and graphically). We’ll also briefly note how these graphs look for polyprotic acids.

We’ll spend some time looking at buffer solutions, both what they are and where you can find them in your life. We’ll look at the Henderson/Hasselbalch equation and buffer regions in weak titrations.

Lastly, we’ll jump back into theory, looking at acid and base anhydrides and the environmental aspects involved for both acid anhydrides and for base anhydrides. We’ll also look at hydrolysis of ionic compounds and discuss why some are acidic, some basic and some neutral.