Subsitution of Burette for Titration

[hydraliskdragon]

I've been waiting to do titration with a standard solution of HCl to determine the concentration of anhydrous ammonia.

 

Would there be a substitute I could use without a Burette for accurate readings?

 

The one possible choice that I've figured was to manually drop the titrant from a beaker until endpoint but I'm not sure if it would be accurate enough.

 

Does anyone know of any other possible way's to carry out titration without a Burette and being as accurate as possible to a real Burette?

 

Thanks

 

 

PS. Burette's are too expensive for me to buy at this time and the concentration of HCl is 0.15 mol/L.

[Sebbass69]

why would you do a titration of anhydrous ammonia? Anhydrous by definition means that it is free of water, and therefore must be 100%...

Or am I misunderstanding your experiment?

[UC]

I'm hoping he means aqueous ammonia...

 

try ebay. You can get a burette for like $20. Or get a good quality graduated syringe. The latter won't really save you much money and the accuracy will suffer.

[ChemSiddiqui]

well pipette might be of some use but you wont know the titre volume unless the end-point reaches exactly when you have emptied the pipette of the HCl. Also, burette are the most accurate glassware for titration.

[John Cuthber]

You can add the HCl slowly with a dropping pipette and weigh the solution added. As much accuracy as your balance can give you, but a pain in the neck to do.

 

A decent burette will let you measure to 1% easilly and 0.1% if you are careful and know what you are doing. I think it's a good investment.

[hermanntrude]

the trouble with weighing is that you will have losses due to evaporation

[John Cuthber]

the trouble with weighing is that you will have losses due to evaporation

 

Particularly if you are really working with anhydrous ammonia; but if you use a fairly dilute solution the losses are generally small.

[Sequence]

In AP Biology we generally use syringes or 1ml pipettes, granted that we don't go for a high degree of accuracy, but the calculations work out.

[hydraliskdragon]

Whoops, I meant to say aqueous ammonia not anhydrous ammonia

 

Wait, since some of you suggested in using pipette, would marking the pipette with calibrated mL lines work for titration so I could determine just how much titrant I used?

 

I've seen many varieties of burettes but the cheaper ones seems to be made of acrylic. About $19 to $25 USD without shipping.

I am eventually planning on buying a glass burette but since it will be much later, I thought that I need a substitute while that time comes.

[UC]

Whoops, I meant to say aqueous ammonia not anhydrous ammonia

 

Wait, since some of you suggested in using pipette, would marking the pipette with calibrated mL lines work for titration so I could determine just how much titrant I used?

 

I've seen many varieties of burettes but the cheaper ones seems to be made of acrylic. About $19 to $25 USD without shipping.

I am eventually planning on buying a glass burette but since it will be much later, I thought that I need a substitute while that time comes.

 

How will you accurately calibrate a pipette without another method of measuring....You could buy maybe a 5ml mohr pipette (and pipette bulb), but they're rather crude and probably not much cheaper than if you catch a deal on a burette.

 

My burette is kimax glass with teflon stopcock. $20 on ebay...you just need to have patience sometimes and don't go by ebay store prices.

[hydraliskdragon]

I was thinking of calibrating the pipette by measuring 5mL of water in a graduated cylinder then sucking the fluid through my pipette and mark the bottom of the Meniscus as 5mL. Then continue doing with 10mL and 15mL and so on.

[CharonY]

That is not very precise, is it? You will add two sources of error into your system.

[John Cuthber]

Do you have a balance? Even one of the cheap ebay ones will give you 0.1g resolution. You can use that to calibrate volumetric glassware (not to ISO standards but, better than a typical measuring cylinder).

[hydraliskdragon]

I have a two decimal place scale, I will try this method and see what I get.

 

Thanks for the help.