Formal Laboratory Report: The Chemistry Of Water

913 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The hydrologic cycle essay

Formal Laboratory Report

The Chemistry of Natural Waters
Submitted by: Yihua Huang

Lab Partners: Leslie Johnson, Thomas Jaramillo,
Andrea Hurtado

Chemistry 111 Section 101
October 19, 2015
TA: Nabeel Ahmed

Section I: Introduction:
Today, hydrologic cycle is one of the most important component to support people’s life. There are more than one billion people are lack of clean drinking water.1 A person need about 80 liters of water every day to maintain a basic quality life.2

The presence of the dissolved cations (like Ca2+, Mg 2+, and other cations) gives water the chemical property called water hardness. Hard water contains very high concentration of dissolved cations. Conversely. Soft water contains very low concentration of …show more content…

Owing to hard water can cause a lot of issues in real life. If people use hard water to wash dishes, it can leave spots on the bowls and plates. Also, hard water cause issues a lot for water boilers. The Ca2+ and Mg2+ will form a scale that makes the water boiler inefficient to work. Moreover, because of hard water contains soluble sedimentary rocks like limestone(CaCO3), pipes with scale can reduce the water flow. This problem increases the energy bills about 25%.3

The hardness of water can be determined by many scientific techniques.
Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry(AA) is useful to determine metals dissolved in a solution. The chemical principle behind AA is the Beer-Lambert Law. It can be easily used to calculate the metal concentration in the water sample. Atoms have energy levels are unique. Atoms need to be matched the energy of light falling on them to be excited.3

EDTA Titration is another technique to determine metals dissolved in water. Different from AA, it analyzed all cations presented in water, instead of just Ca2+ and Mg2+. 3

Another water to determine water hardness is called Total Dissolved Solids (TDS). It measures the amount of residue that was left in a known amount of water after

Show More
Related

  • The Hydrologic Cycle and Desert Landscapes

    1097 Words  | 3 Pages

    The hydrologic cycle is a process that moves water throughout the Earth’s environment. “In terms of water, the earth is a closed system, so water isn’t added or removed from earth; it’s simply transformed, transported, and recycled” (Spooner, 2013). This process, driven by energy provided by the sun, cycles water in a never-ending cycle between the oceans, sky and land. The process begins with the sun causing evaporation of surface waters of the oceans. The vaporized water droplets attach themselves to dust particles and form clouds. In a relative short amount of time, the water vapor transforms into precipitation and falls in to Earth as rain, snow or other form of precipitation.

    Read More

  • Arsenic Essay

    2066 Words  | 5 Pages

    Arsenic is the 20th most common element in the earth’s crust and can be found naturally in our environment. There is around 0.006 to 0.03 ppm or arsenic distributed in seawater, and 20 ppm of arsenic in soil (before pesticides). Every human will ingest about 0.5 to 1 mg of arsenic in a day from food and water, because arsenic is present in higher quantities in se...

    Read More

  • Essay On Gravimetric Analysis

    924 Words  | 2 Pages

    Hard water can cause health problems and can be costly as it can create scum buildups that interfere with the movement of water through pipes. Gravimetric analysis, a technique that uses the mass of a precipitate to determine the composition and identity of an unknown compound, was used to determine the water hardness and the effectiveness of this technique was analyzed. By examining the data it can be concluded that gravimetric analysis can be effective in measuring water hardness. However, there was a correlation between the percent yield and the initial theoretical water hardness. This can be explained by looking at the reaction at the particulate level. As the concentration of ions increases, the likelihood they will interact also increases and therefore solutions with higher concentrations are more likely to have a higher percent yield than solution that are more dilute. Errors that may have affected percent yield in the gravimetric analysis could have been losing substance while transferring or not stirring the compound long enough so that all the ions could interact and form a precipitate. Based on the results, gravimetric analysis is an effective method of determining water hardness if the theoretical sample is a concentrated

    Read More

  • Softening Hard Water With Sodium Carbonate

    1567 Words  | 4 Pages

    Softening Hard Water With Sodium Carbonate Prediction ---------- In a preliminary experiment, we discovered that adding 1g. Na2CO3 to hard water softened it slightly. We tested both tap water and distilled water with the sodium stearate and discovered that tap water was far harder than distilled water, we then tested tap water that 1g of Na2CO3 had been applied to. This solution was softer than the original tap water.

    Read More

  • Alkaline Water Essay

    1027 Words  | 3 Pages

    Alkaline in alkaline water refers to the water's pH level. The pH level, in turn, is a measure of how acidic or alkaline the water is. Typically, the measuring scale for the acidity or alkalinity of a substance is 0 to 14. If a substance has a pH level of 1, it is said to be very acidic and a substance that has a pH level of 13 would be considered very alkaline.

    Read More

  • Water Dehydration Essay

    667 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...ed to clean much more effectively. Soft water is much gentler, but it can be criticized as being too “soft”. One is not particularly safer than the other, and it all comes down to a matter of opinion over which one should be used in the household.

    Read More

  • Water Hardness Lab

    1024 Words  | 3 Pages

    The water hardness is most commonly measured using two different units, either parts per million or parts per gallon. The four samples involved in this project are: Filtered water from a water bottle, water from the Spring Creek Park at State College, water from the Janitor’s closet, and tap water from Copper Beech apartment. In this experiment, these samples were subjected to various tests and procedures to determine specific things in each case. These stages were, determination of water hardness by atomic absorption spectroscopy (AA), evaporation of the water to give total dissolved solids, divalent cation analysis by EDTA titration, determination of the hardness of water sample, water softening with a commercial water-conditioning agent in this case resin, and divalent cation removal ion exchange. After all these steps, and after testing all four of the water samples we were able to determine how to get the water hardness from any water sample the factors involved in the hardness levels, as well as its implications depending on what the water wants to be used for. Therefore, for this experiment there is an expectation of having the following

    Read More

  • Investigating the Hardness of Water

    1131 Words  | 3 Pages

    Investigating the Hardness of Water Planning Aim To investigate the hardness of water in 5 different water solutions Background knowledge about hard water The hardness of water is caused by the presence of Calcium 2+ and magnesium 2+ ions in the water. These minerals in water can cause some everyday problems. They react with soap and produce a deposit called "soap scum" that remains on the skin and clothes and, because it is insoluble and sticky, cannot be removed by rinsing. Soap curd changes the pH of the skin and may cause infection and irritation. It also remains on the hair making it dull and difficult to manage.

    Read More

  • Acid Mine Drainage

    1376 Words  | 3 Pages

    However, when the pH levels reach a certain stage, the iron can then precipitate out, coating sediments with the characteristic yellow, red or orange colourings (D.E.P. 2, 2002; U.S.G.S. ; U.S.E.P.A., 2002). The rate that A.M.D. advances is also influenced by the presence of certain bacteria (Doyle; U.S.G.S). A.M.D. that has dissolved heavy metals such as copper, lead and mercury can contaminate ground and surface water.

    Read More

  • The Chemical Properties of Water

    593 Words  | 2 Pages

    Each water molecule consists of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The oxygen atom (or the apex of the water molecule) bears a slight electronegative charge while hydrogen possesses a more positive one. Because opposite charges attract, the water molecules are drawn together. When an oxygen atom is linked to a neighboring molecule's hydrogen atom, a bond called a hydrogen bond is formed. In an ice crystal the hydrogen bonds to give the shape of the crystal so that the grid of molecules surrounds relatively to large spaces. In a liquid form, water has no such spaces; so ice is less dense and will float on liquid water. If not for this, great bodies of water would freeze from the bottom up without the insulation of a top layer of ice and all life in the water would die.

    Read More

  • Water Quality Essay

    1129 Words  | 3 Pages

    BOD determines the quality of water by measuring the amount of dissolved oxygen in the samples. The oxygen in the water is usually from photosynthesis of aquatic plants and oxygen from the air that dissolved into the water. Bacteria uses the dissolved oxygen to degrade the organic matters and produce energy for cell maintenance and growth. The Bacteria/micro- organisms will stop growing until the organic matters run out hence the less the organic matters, the better the water quality. The BOD experiment can measure change of dissolved oxygen level and calculate the amount of micro-organism in each sample. [1]

    Read More

  • Total Dissolved Solids Essay

    857 Words  | 2 Pages

    Water is a good solvent and picks up impurities easily. Pure water -- tasteless, colourless, and odourless -- is often called the universal solvent. Dissolved solids" refer to any minerals, salts, metals, cations or anions dissolved in water. Total dissolved solids (TDS) comprise inorganic salts (principally calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, bicarbonates, chlorides, and sulphates) and some small amounts of organic matter that are dissolved in water. TDS in drinking-water originate from natural sources, sewage, urban run-off, industrial wastewater, and chemicals used in the water treatment process, and the nature of the piping or hardware used to convey the water, i.e., the plumbing. In the United States, elevated TDS has been due to natural environmental features such as mineral springs, carbonate deposits, salt deposits, and sea water intrusion, but other sources may include: salts used for road de-icing, anti-skid materials, drinking water treatment chemicals, storm-water, and agricultural runoff, and point/non-point wastewater discharges. In general, the total dissolved solids concentration is the sum of the cations (positively charged) and anions (negatively charged) ions in the water. Therefore, the total dissolved solids test provides a qualitative measure of the

    Read More

  • What Are The Most Considerable Impacts You Make?

    1123 Words  | 3 Pages

    Water is a necessity for the existence of human beings. Approximately 71 % of the earth is water and it exists in many different forms. From water vapor in the atmosphere, to rivers and lakes on the earth’s surface to glaciers and icecaps to aquifers in the ground. Water is constantly moving from one place to the other and from one state to the other and this process is known as the water cycle. As water evaporates, vapors rise and condense into clouds. The clouds move over the land, and precipitation falls in the form of rain, ice or snow. The water fills streams and rivers, and eventually flows back into the oceans where evaporation starts the process anew. Water 's state (solid, liquid or gas) is determined mostly by temperature. Although water continuously changes states from solid to liquid to gas, the amount of water on Earth remains constant. There is as much water now as there was hundreds of millions of years ago (Project, 1995).

    Read More

  • The Global Water Crisis

    2639 Words  | 6 Pages

    Freshwater in the world makes up only a small portion of the water on the planet. While the percentage of water in the world is nearly 70%, only 2.5% is consumable. Even further, only 1% is easily accessible to basic human needs. According to National Geographic, “by 2025, an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagued by water scarcity, with two-thirds of the world's population living in water-stressed regions as a result of use, growth, and climate change.” With this current trend, water will become more immersed in environmental, economic, political, and social changes.

    Read More

  • Global Warming Position Paper

    1215 Words  | 3 Pages

    In order for the world to function, there are certain cycles that happen all the time that may not be understood. The water cycle occurs on a daily basis and at all times during the day. Evaporation and Precipitation are among the most ...

    Read More

More about Formal Laboratory Report: The Chemistry Of Water

Open Document