The Investigation of Equilibria in Solution

This contribution describes the practical and computational aspects relevant for the quantitative analysis of chemical equilibria. First a systematic nomenclature based on stability constants is introduced. Next, practical aspects of potentiometric pH titrations and spectrophotometric titrations are discussed. The description of the computational aspects includes the Newton- Raphson algorithm that allows the computation of all species concentrations for a given model, set of formation constants and total component concentrations. The second computational part introduces the Newton-Gauss algorithm for non-linear data fitting. Three practical examples illustrate all the above. They include the spectrophotometric investigations of the interaction of Bi(III) with Cl-, of Cu(II) with EDTA and the potentiometric investigation of the Zn(II) ethylenediamine system. All Matlab softwares for the data generation and analysis are available from the authors