Anthony Rodesney

Spring 2016

Materials Needed:
White vinegar
Carbonated beverage
Lemon juice
Tap water
Distilled water
pH tester
Standards for pH tester

1. Your pH tester includes a digital display plus electrode, and two calibrated buffer solutions of
pH = 4 and 7. Follow the instructions that come with the tester to calibrate your pH tester
against these two buffer solutions.

2. Using the tester, measure the pH of tap water, lemon juice, vinegar and a carbonated
beverage, and fill in the table with your results

3. Based upon your investigations from last week, what should the pH of the solutions be if you
dilute them by 10 times and 100 times using distilled water?
I would expect for the pH to increase by 1 for every 10x dilution with distilled water.
Tap water
Vinegar
Diet Coke
Lemon Juice
Rainwater

Starting pH
6.4
2.48
3.02
2.61
5.5

10x dilution
----------2.9
3.95
2.52
5.35

100x dilution
---------3.24
4.21
2.84
5.0

4. Try diluting them using the 1:10 technique that we tried last week (1 part acid + 9 parts
water, and then a second dilution), and report your answers in the table.
Discussion:
Are there any surprising results in your measurements?
Katie Lesando and I worked together on this one and got some strange results that I cannot
explain. We had expected for the pH to increase by one for each 10x dilution with distilled water,
but this was never the case. The Diet Coke was the closest liquid to showing what we expected to
happen. In the rainwater sample we even saw a decrease in pH. The lemon juice seems to have

Anthony Rodesney
Spring 2016
become more acidic after the first dilution before becoming less acidic after the second. We were
careful to rinse the probe with distilled water between each test and to change the rinse water
between each liquid. At different times throughout the experiment we checked the accuracy of
the probe by retesting the buffer solutions and the reading was always accurate.
What questions do you still have about the concepts of concentration and pH measurement?
At this point Im wondering if the solutions that we tested were homogenous. Could the ions
have been concentrated near the bottom of the solution where we were not always testing? Did
we not mix them thoroughly? I have never heard of this possibility and an Internet search wasnt
fruitful. I would also like to know where the error came from in our experiment.