CHEM 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Buffer Solution, Ammonium Chloride, Conjugate Acid
6 Apr 2016
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Chapter 17 - additional aspects of acid-base equilibria. One of the most complex acid-base systems is also one of the most common and important. A buffer is a solution that is highly resistant to ph changes. Buffers are so important because many chemical and biological reactions only occur within a specific ph range. Human blood is usually buffered to a ph of around 7. 4. Buffers work via a combination of neutralization reactions and le ch telier"s principle. In neutralization reactions, an acid and a base neutralize to produce predictable products: The most common chemical buffers (the ones we will be dealing with exclusively) are formed by a solution containing significant amounts of both an acid and it"s conjugate base (or a base and it"s conjugate acid). This combination of aqueous compounds allows le ch telier"s principle to help keep the equilibrium in balance. Recall the shifting scale that we created in the previous sections:
