Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Strong bases
Explaining the term "strong base"
A strong base is something like sodium hydroxide or potassium
hydroxide which is fully ionic. You can think of the compound as
being 100% split up into metal ions and hydroxide ions in solution.
Each mole of sodium hydroxide dissolves to give a mole of
hydroxide ions in solution.
converted by W eb2PDFConvert.com
There will be far fewer hydrogen ions than there are in pure water,
but there will still be hydrogen ions present. The pH is a measure
of the concentration of these.
An outline of the method of working out the pH of a strong
base
Work out the concentration of the hydroxide ions.
Use Kw to work out the hydrogen ion concentration.
Convert the hydrogen ion concentration to a pH.
An example
converted by W eb2PDFConvert.com
Weak bases
Explaining the term "weak base"
Ammonia is a typical weak base. Ammonia itself obviously doesn't
contain hydroxide ions, but it reacts with water to produce
ammonium ions and hydroxide ions.
Note: If you want to know why the water has been omitted
from the bottom of this expression, you will find it explained
on the page about strong and weak acids under the
corresponding constant, Ka.
Use the BACK button on your browser when you are ready to
return to this page.
converted by W eb2PDFConvert.com
pKb
The relationship between Kb and pKb is exactly the same as all the
other "p" terms in this topic:
The table shows some values for Kb and pKb for some weak
bases.
base
C6H5NH2
4.17 x 10-10
9.38
NH3
1.78 x 10-5
4.75
CH3NH2
4.37 x 10-4
3.36
CH3CH2NH2
5.37 x 10-4
3.27
converted by W eb2PDFConvert.com