Abstract: The goal of this experiment was to determine which variety of vinegar has the greatest acidity. An acid base titration was carried out using one of the five vinegars, and sodium hydroxide (sodium hydroxide being the standard solution). By using the data gathered from the experiment, the concentration of acetic acid for a certain vinegar was able to be calculated. Once each of the vinegar’s concentrations were compared on a bar graph, it was observed that distilled white vinegar had the highest acidity.
Question of the day: Which variety of vinegar has the greatest acidity?
Hypothesis: Apple cider vinegar is the type of vinegar that is the most acidic.
Experimental Technique: The purpose of the experiment was to titrate apple cider…show more content… In a titration, a standard solution is gradually added to another reactant (with an unknown concentration). The standard solution will stop being added once the chemical reactions between the two has finished (reached its equivalence point). The base solution’s volume will be used to find the amount of moles in the unknown solution; this in turn will be used to calculate the concentration of the other reactant. In this experiment, an acid based titration was performed to calculate the acetic acid concentration of given types of vinegar. Thus helping to determine what type of vinegar has the greatest acidity. A titration was conducted with sodium hydroxide (NaOH) as the standard solution, and apple cider as the other reactant. The initial volume of NaOH was subtracted from the final volume of NaOH to find the total volume of NaOH needed to reach the equivalence point. Finally, the concentration of acetic acid in the apple cider vinegar was determined by multiplying the volume of NaOH needed to reach equivalence point by the moles of NaOH in the titration and lastly dividing by the amount of apple cider vinegar present. The concentration of apple cider vinegar was about .8474M. A possible error that occurred during the experiment actually took place in the titration of distilled white vinegar. As a consequence of the vinegar bottle being constantly opened (and water possibly evaporating from the vinegar), the final concentration calculated was too high. It is unclear of how high an error this was. The hypothesis to this experiment was not upheld. The concentration of acetic acid for apple cider vinegar was close to .8M while distilled white vinegar’s was close to 1.6M, therefor, the vinegar which had the highest acidity was actually distilled white vinegar. To sum up, the acid base titration between sodium hydroxide and ‘x’ vinegar was used to calculate its concentration of acetic acid. As a result, it