salt and milk:

[lnr]

didn't work. Was OK for half an hour or so but then had the nastiest bit of acidyness I've had in ages. Oh well. Rather better today. Oh yeah, and my wrist is almost entirely back to normal too, which is cool.

Comments

[catyak]

It's vaguely coming back to me now. Not sure how it'll appear on here though.

[H+][CL-]
---------- = constant
[HCl]

The concentration of H+ ions is a measure of the acidity. Common salt, NaCl, will reach its own equilibrium in a similar manner. However, putting the two together will mean the [Cl-] from one will affect the other and so decrease the concentration of [H+] to maintain the constant.

However, my O level chemistry was 1980 and A level in 1982 so even longer ago than yours. Any chemists reading who can give a definitive answer?

D

[sparrowsion]

I've got second-year undergrad chemistry from 1990, but it's still rather rusty. What I do remember is that the term describing this effect is "buffer solution" and the effect is only really noticable if the dissociation constants aren't too extreme (ie there's a significant concentration of both molecules and ions). NaCl and HCl both have pretty high dissociation constants, hence you won't see much buffering effect. (pH, BTW, is something like -log(dissociation constant), and is ρK having gone through Latinisation and German chemists, IIRC.) Hopefully ptc24 will be along to correct me shortly.

[imc.livejournal.com]

[Excuse me for jumping in to state the obvious]

pH is minus the log of the molar H+ ion concentration. Bases with high dissociation constants will have high pH while acids with high dissociation constants will have low pH.

I understand there is also a pKx for measuring the dissociation constant of particular substances x.