Acid-base equilibria

Acids and bases are easy to deal with when they are strong, as you can assume that any reaction goes to completion. However, weak acids and bases don’t always ionise completely, so you need to look at the equilibria to fully understand them.

Acids dissociate in water to give a proton, (or hydronium ion) and the conjugate base ion.

 HA ⇄ H+ + A

 We can put this into an equilibrium expression, which gives us Ka, the acid ionisation constant:

Ka is an indication of the strength of the acid, the stronger the acid, the larger the Ka.

The same thing applies to bases;

B + H2O ⇄ HB+ + OH

Leading to the Kb expression:

Ka and Kb are the inverse of one another for a given equilibrium.


Most of the stuff for acid-base equilibria is the same as for any other chemical equilibrium problem, however buffers do require a bit more discussion.

A buffer is a solution that can resist changes in pH when small amounts of acid or base are added. They are very important in a broader sense as they regulate the pH of your body and the oceans. Buffers contain a conjugate pair of a weak acid or base, generally in equal parts, for example a carbonate buffer would look like this:

H2CO3 ⇄ H+ + HCO3

where you have added H2CO3 and NaHCO3 to water. The buffer can shift its equilibrium between the acid and conjugate base when small amounts of acid or base are added. The pH will be regulated, because you have such large amounts of H2CO3 and HCO3 to start with, any small change will not affect the overall equilibrium to a large degree.

The Henderson-Hasselbalch equation is used to calculate the pH of a given buffer, and is just a rearrangement of the Ka expression:



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Filed under Chem 1, Inorganic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry

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