Adding Strong Acid to Buffer
Part A
Learning Goal:
Consider a beaker with 175 mL acetic acid buffer with a pH of 5.000. A student adds 0.300 M HCl solution to the beaker. How much will the pH of this buffer change? The pKa of acetic acid is 4.740.
Express your answer numerically to two decimal places. Use a minus sign (-) if the pH has decreased.
A buffer is a solution containing a weak acid and its conjugate base. For example, acetic acid buffer consists of acetic acid (CH3COOH) and its conjugate base (CH3COO-). Because ions cannot simply disappear in a solution, the conjugate base is formed when a weak acid is added to the buffer solution, and the conjugate acid is formed when a base is added to the buffer solution (e.g. sodium acetate, NaCH3COO).
Buffers work because the conjugate acid-base pair work together to neutralize the addition of H+ or OH- ions. For example, if H+ ions are added to the acetate buffer described above, they will be largely removed from solution by the action of the conjugate base:
CH3COO- + H+ -> CH3COOH
Similarly, added OH- ions will be neutralized by reaction with the conjugate acid:
CH3COOH + OH- -> CH3COO- + H2O
This buffer system is described by the Henderson-Hasselbalch Equation:
pH = pKa + log [conjugate base]/[conjugate acid]