pH Lab

Guiding Question: What happens when you add a neutral to an acid? What happens when you add a neutral to a base.

Hypothesis: The base will turn into an acid because it is being diluted to make it neutral or into an acid. The acid will turn into a base.

Materials:

• Acids: Gurana (pH 4), wine vinegar (pH 3), HCl (pH 1), Blueberry juice (pH 4), pepsi twist (pH 4), green tea (pH 4).
• Bases: Hand soap (pH 7 or 8), shampoo (pH 7or 8), soap (domestos) (pH 13) and windex (pH 10).
• Neutrals: Oil (pH 7), indicator (Cabbage Juice)

Procedure:
1)  Decide on materials how going to mix.
2) Write Guiding Question, and come up with Hypothesis
3) Set up lab.
4) Place 10 drops of neutral into 10 drops of each ingredient.
5)Test each ingredient to see whether they were acids or bases
6) Used red and blue litmus paper to test if the ingredient had changed pH
7) Observed the results

Data Table/ Observations:
After adding 10 drops of neutral (in this case oil) into an acid (in this case Gurana, wine vinegar, HCl, Blueberry juice, pepsi twist or green tea) , it stays an acid but has been diluted and the pH is closer to 7(neutral). After adding 10 drops of neutral (in this case oil) into a base (in this case Hand soap, shampoo, soap (domestos) or windex) , it stays a base but has been diluted and the pH is closer to 7(neutral).

Conclusion: To conclude, though we did not do a very good job with this lab we still discovered some new things.  if you add a a neutral (we used oil) to an acid or base it will dilute to a less strong version of the substance it already was. So seeing as it dilutes it goes closer to a 7 on the pH scale, which is a neutral. However some substances did still have a visually stronger reaction than others. For example, wine vinegar (pH of 3) turns a dark pink color whereas Gurana (pH of 4) turn a lighter shade of pink. As for the bases shampoo (pH of 7/8) becomes a light turquoise colour. But the Domestos Soap (pH of 13) becomes a bright green color which fades to white!! So I think that the bases seemed to have a stronger reaction that the acids. I think that this was probably becauses bases are weaker than acids.

Further Inquiry: As I said in my conclusion the quality and commitment that we showed was low. Therefore there are several things that should be improved if we were to do this lab again. We could have/should have found away to show the before and after piece of adding the cabbage juice which would have made our experiment more scienctific because we could judge off of hard copy materials rather than using our memory. Also if we had recorded our observations during the lab we might have had a lot less trouble writing up the lab. This is the reason we do not have a data table. So we could have done many things better however what we did do seemed to come out quite well.