Just when you think that every possible variation of acid-base titrations has been explored and documented, along comes one more—and this one is really interesting. Larry Dukerich (Arizona State University) and Guy Ashkenazi (The Israel Center for Excellence through Education) constructed a custom Logger Pro 3 experiment file so that an acid-base titration would plot the hydronium H3O+ ion concentration vs. the volume of OH– ions added to the reaction mixture.
According to their article, displaying the titration data in this form allows the student to “determine the concentration of an unknown base by focusing attention on the point at which the [H3O+] appears to reach zero.”
In a later portion of the data analysis, Dukerich suggests that the student zoom in on the area of the plot near the equivalence point to observe that the hydronium ion concentration indeed is never exactly 0.00 M. Examining the data in this way, Dukerich asserts, opens the students’ eyes to a clearer view of an acid-base titration.