Question

How does the process of titration work?

Answer 1

Titration is the name of the process which involves determination of concentration of a certain species in a liquid by calculating the amount of another known substance used to react with it. The unknown species containing solution is called titre and the known species containing solution is called titrant.

Complete step-by-step answer: To determine concentration of a species via titration we need to first take a certain amount of the solution containing the species we are interested in and placing it in a Conical flask of certain known volume this is the titre and let it contains $xM$ of the species, where x is an amount to be determined and M is the symbol of molarity. Now we place this flask under a burette containing a species known to react with the earlier mentioned species and has a known concentration.
Now we add an indicator into the volumetric flask to indicate the end of the reaction or use a pH probe and start titrating the unknown species containing solution by adding the known concentration titrant slowly dropwise till we observe the necessary change.
After say $10ml$ of adding the titrant we obtain a color change caused by the indicator there we stop titration and take this ready.
Now say we initially took $yml$ of the unknown solution having concentration $xM$ then now we know that it took $10ml$ of the known solution having concentration say $2M$ then,
$x \times y = 10 \times 2$ From ${M_1}{V_1} = {M_2}{V_2}$ formula.
Thus,$x =\dfrac{20}{y}$ $M$.
This is how the process of titration works.

Note: While doing titration be careful to not add excess of indicator as this would cause an error in calculations, Also when doing titration add titrant dropwise and shake the titre well to mix the titre and titrant properly otherwise titrant might just stick on the walls of the conical flask rather falling and thus not react with titre and this would lead to error in calculation.