Professionals in a scientific laboratory and in the healthcare field need to acc

Question

Professionals in a scientific laboratory and in the healthcare field need to accurately prepare solutions for a number of reasons. If you wear contacts, you probably use a saline solution to rinse your contacts. What solutions do you use at work? How would you calculate the amount of solute to the solvent to prepare this solution? If you do not wear contacts but you use or make cleaning solutions for your housework, how would you accurately prepare solutions to clean? What solutions do you use that use percent concentration? please give an example

Explanation / Answer

All kinds of acid solutions to digest samples, the most common being HCl, H2SO4 and HNO3 are used. The most common basic solution for titrations is NaOH and metal solutions (stocks) with 1000ppm concentrations when performing analysis of atomic absorption spectroscopy, being the most common metals Fe, Pb, Cr, Ni and Zn.are used.

For any given solution, if we know its concentration, we can calculate how much grams of the solute to add to the solvent to get our solution. The volume of solvent is our choice. For example if we chose 1L to be the volume of solution, we would use that as the total volume (only if the solute is not another liquid). Typical concentration units involve %w/w, %v/v, %w/v and M. When we know how much of solute to add, we need to be as precise and accurate as possible and use an analytical balance, and when measuring volumes we should use volumetric flasks or volumetric pippetes.

Cleaning solutions are usually made by liquids, and clearly we don't have volumetric flasks or pippetes to use in the house, a way to prepare accurate solutions would be by using a measuring cup from our kitchen to measure the liquid amounts as accurately as possible.

In the house we can find muriatic acid for cleaning (that is around 30% HCl) or we can also use hydrogen peroxide (which is around 3% H2O2).

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse P
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.