Tap water has a higher conductivity than distilled water and bottled water because it contains trace amounts

of ions, such as sodium, copper, fluoride, and chloride ions, which distilled water and bottled water do not have. Distilled water should have no ions in it, and sometimes bottled water will contain very small amounts of sodium. Distilled water has all the minerals and all the dissolved gases removed. There is nothing in it to allow electricity to be conducted. Tap water may or may not conduct electricity depending on the level of mineral content. It is the dissolved minerals that cause the water to conduct. Most tap water contains a sufficient abount of dissolved minerals to signficantly conduct electricity.

A substance can only conduct electricity if it contains charged particles (electrons orions) that are free to move around. In solid sodium chloride, there are ions but these ions are locked into the ionic lattice and are unable to move. Ergo, solid sodium chloride is unable to conduct electricity. to conduct electricity, you need to have charges that are free to move around, like free electrons in metal or ions floating around in solution (that's an electrolyte). sodium chloride is an ionic compound. it conducts electricity in molten (i.e. liquid) form and when dissolved in solution. in solid form it does not conduct because the atoms are locked up in a tight lattice.

In solid table salt (sodium chloride or NaCl), the atoms of sodium and chlorine are locked to each other in ionic bonds, and these molecules are, in turn, locked into a crystal matrix. There are no "free electrons" in this structure that are available to support the flow of electric current. That's why salt in its solid form won't conduct electricity. It's a different story when sodium chloride is in aqueous solution or is molten. In solution, salt molecules will dissociate. They will "decompose" into ions of sodium and chlorine, what are Na+ and Cl- as we write them in chemistry. These ions have mobility in the solution, and if we stick a pair of electrodes into a salt solution and hook up a battery, we can get current flow through the solution. The ions themselves will be the charge carriers, and salt water is a conductor or an electrolyte. If we melt sodium chloride, it will undergo thermal dissociation. The heat of fusion (standard enthalpy of fusion) is sufficient to again cause the molecules of salt to "decompose" into those ions we spoke of, and the ions will be mobile in the molten salt like they are when salt is in solution. Molten salt will conduct electricity.

Molecular: Na2SO4(aq) + BaCl2(aq) -------> 2NaCl(aq) + BaSO4(s) Complete ionic:

2Na^+(aq) + SO4^2-(aq) + Ba^2+(aq) + 2Cl^-(aq) -------> 2Na^+(aq) + 2Cl^-(aq) + BaSO4(s) Net ionic:(obtained by eliminating spectator ions) Ba^2+(aq) + SO4^2-(aq) -------> BaSO4(s) 5 years ago

Ba(OH)2(aq) + H2SO4(aq) --> BaSO4(s) + 2H2O(l) As you perform the reaction you are going from an ion rich solution to basically water with a precipitate floating in it. The are no more ions to conduct the electricity so the conductivity will drop to the conductivity of water alone. 5 years ago

Because the solution is no longer conductive - it's just water: H2SO4(aq) + Ba(OH)2(aq) --> BaSO4(s) + 2HO2(l) the BaSO4(s) can't conduct the electricity since it's insoluble and sitting at the bottom of the reaction vessel. You should explain in more detail what your experiment was, but I presume that you were using some kind of light bulb based conductance meter to measure the conductance of a solution. When the light is on, it means the solution is conducting electricity. When it's off, the solution is not conducting. Sulfuric acid, H2SO4, is an acid, and barium hydroxide, Ba(OH)2, is a base. When you mix the two, a neutralization reaction occurs that forms water and a salt. The equation is: H2SO4 (aq) + Ba(OH)2 (aq) ----> 2H2O (l) + BaSO4 (s) The "aq" means "aqueous" (meaning that the substance consists of ions dissolved in solution), the "l" meand "liquid", and the "s" means "solid". Now, conducting electricity requires the movement of charged particles. Before they are mixed, we have aqueous substances that consist of charged particles floating around the solution. These charged ions can move around and conduct positive and negative charge to different electrodes on your meter. However, once they are mixed and the reaction occurs, you get water (a neutral molecule) and barium sulfate (an INSOLUBLE, neutral solid). Neither of these are capable of moving charges around a solution. Thus, you have lost all the ions that were conducting electricity, the conductance of the solution falls to zero, and the lightbulb on your meter goes out. 5 years ago