Natural Water Lab
11 November 2014
Chem 111 Experimental Chemistry I
Section 104
The Pennsylvania State University
Lab Report on Experiment 10- The Chemistry of Natural Waters
Introduction
What is water hardness?
Water is extremely important to all living things and even to non-living things, indirectly.
Therefore, the way water travels and gets to a place is also extremely important because its transportation methods determine the chemicals that get involved and added into the water as it travels. This relates to the hardness of water. The hardness of water is basically caused by the amounts of charged minerals in water. The two most significant ones are magnesium (Mg2+) and calcium (Ca2+)(1). Water is an excellent solvent and therefore easily picks up …show more content…
How do softening techniques work?
There are two different techniques that can be used in order to soften hard water. The first technique is by using commercial water conditioning agents. The second technique is by using cation resin exchange. For the first method, the desired effect can be achieved through simply adding a commercial water-conditioning agent, such as the arm and hammer super washing soda, to the water sample. Through this reaction, the minerals are separated from the water as they react and eventually attach to the agent. For the second method, water is be softened by literally exchanging resin ions, (Na+ or H+) with cations. (Ca2+ and Mg2+).
What is your hypothesis?
As a group, we chose to the measure the hardness of 5 different water samples. 1) Whipple dam
2) Spring creek 3) Slab Cabin Run 4) Lake at Golf Course 5) Tap Water. We expected the whipple damn to be fairly soft because this water comes from rain and rain water is naturally
soft. However, the water at the bottom of the creek we expected to be hard because it reacts with soil, rocks and such that release Mg2+ and Ca2+ ions. This makes the water hard. We …show more content…
AA was clearly the most efficient and accurate way to measure hardness. Although this method is quite expensive due to the cost of machinery, it minimizes any human error. Therefore, the results are extremely accurate. In Table 4, Section B: the different residues are listed from the different water samples. The tap water had heavy white residue, the spring creek had visible white residue, the whipple dam had very light traces of white residue, and the golf course and slab cabin run both had heavy white residue. This matches up exactly with the our AA results of ppm content. In the AA results, the tap water had a 187.2ppm, the spring creek had a 78.25ppm, the whipple dam had a 6.35ppm, the golf course had a 186.57ppm, and the slab cabin run had a
125.7ppm. Therefore, the AA results are directly proportional to the amount of residue we observed in Section B.
In Section D, Table 9 we got our results through the EDTA titration process. From
Chem 111 Experimental Chemistry I
Section 104
The Pennsylvania State University
Lab Report on Experiment 10- The Chemistry of Natural Waters
Introduction
What is water hardness?
Water is extremely important to all living things and even to non-living things, indirectly.
Therefore, the way water travels and gets to a place is also extremely important because its transportation methods determine the chemicals that get involved and added into the water as it travels. This relates to the hardness of water. The hardness of water is basically caused by the amounts of charged minerals in water. The two most significant ones are magnesium (Mg2+) and calcium (Ca2+)(1). Water is an excellent solvent and therefore easily picks up …show more content…
How do softening techniques work?
There are two different techniques that can be used in order to soften hard water. The first technique is by using commercial water conditioning agents. The second technique is by using cation resin exchange. For the first method, the desired effect can be achieved through simply adding a commercial water-conditioning agent, such as the arm and hammer super washing soda, to the water sample. Through this reaction, the minerals are separated from the water as they react and eventually attach to the agent. For the second method, water is be softened by literally exchanging resin ions, (Na+ or H+) with cations. (Ca2+ and Mg2+).
What is your hypothesis?
As a group, we chose to the measure the hardness of 5 different water samples. 1) Whipple dam
2) Spring creek 3) Slab Cabin Run 4) Lake at Golf Course 5) Tap Water. We expected the whipple damn to be fairly soft because this water comes from rain and rain water is naturally
soft. However, the water at the bottom of the creek we expected to be hard because it reacts with soil, rocks and such that release Mg2+ and Ca2+ ions. This makes the water hard. We …show more content…
AA was clearly the most efficient and accurate way to measure hardness. Although this method is quite expensive due to the cost of machinery, it minimizes any human error. Therefore, the results are extremely accurate. In Table 4, Section B: the different residues are listed from the different water samples. The tap water had heavy white residue, the spring creek had visible white residue, the whipple dam had very light traces of white residue, and the golf course and slab cabin run both had heavy white residue. This matches up exactly with the our AA results of ppm content. In the AA results, the tap water had a 187.2ppm, the spring creek had a 78.25ppm, the whipple dam had a 6.35ppm, the golf course had a 186.57ppm, and the slab cabin run had a
125.7ppm. Therefore, the AA results are directly proportional to the amount of residue we observed in Section B.
In Section D, Table 9 we got our results through the EDTA titration process. From