Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Strong and Weak Acid 1
Strong and Weak Acid 1
This page explains the terms strong and weak as applied to acids. As a part of this it
defines and explains what is meant by pH, Ka and pKa.
It is important that you don't confuse the words strong and weakwith the
terms concentrated and dilute.
As you will see below, the strength of an acid is related to the proportion of it which has
reacted with water to produce ions. The concentration tells you about how much of the
original acid is dissolved in the solution.
Strong acids
Note: If you don't know what the Bronsted-Lowry theory of acids is, you should read about theories of
acids and baseson another page in this section. You don't need to spend time reading about Lewis acids
and bases for the purposes of this present page.
Use the BACK button on your browser when you are ready to return to this page.
These reactions are all reversible, but in some cases, the acid is so good at giving away
hydrogen ions that we can think of the reaction as being one-way. The acid is virtually
100% ionised.
For example, when hydrogen chloride dissolves in water to make hydrochloric acid, so
little of the reverse reaction happens that we can write:
At any one time, virtually 100% of the hydrogen chloride will have reacted to produce
hydroxonium ions and chloride ions. Hydrogen chloride is described as a strong acid.
Other common strong acids include sulphuric acid and nitric acid.
You may find the equation for the ionisation written in a simplified form:
This shows the hydrogen chloride dissolved in the water splitting to give hydrogen ions
in solution and chloride ions in solution.
This version is often used in this work just to make things look easier. If you use it,
remember that the water is actually involved, and that when you write H +(aq) what you
really mean is a hydroxonium ion, H3O+.
Note: You should find out what your examiners prefer on this. You are unlikely to find this from your
syllabus, but should look at recent exam papers and mark schemes. If you are doing a UK-based exam
and haven't got copies of yoursyllabus and past papers, you should have! Follow this link to find out how
to get hold of them.
Defining pH
Note: If you are asked to define pH in an exam, simply write down the expression in black. Never try to
define it in words - it is a waste of time, and you are too likely to miss something out (like mentioning that
the concentration has to be in mol dm -3). In the expression, above, the square brackets imply that, so you
don't need to mention it.
Suppose you had to work out the pH of 0.1 mol dm -3hydrochloric acid. All you have to
do is work out the concentration of the hydrogen ions in the solution, and then use your
calculator to convert it to a pH.
Hydrochloric acid is a strong acid - virtually 100% ionised. Each mole of HCl reacts with
the water to give 1 mole of hydrogen ions and 1 mole of chloride ions
That means that if the concentration of the acid is 0.1 mol dm -3, then the concentration
of hydrogen ions is also 0.1 mol dm-3.
Use your calculator to convert this into pH. My calculator wants me to enter 0.1, and
then press the "log" button. Yours might want you to do it in a different order. You need
to find out!
log10 [0.1] = -1
- (-1) = 1
Note: If you want more examples to look at and to try yourself (with fully worked solutions given), you
may be interested in my chemistry calculations book. This also includes the slightly more confusing
problem of converting pH back into hydrogen ion concentration.
Weak acids
A weak acid is one which doesn't ionise fully when it is dissolved in water.
Ethanoic acid is a typical weak acid. It reacts with water to produce hydroxonium ions
and ethanoate ions, but the back reaction is more successful than the forward one. The
ions react very easily to reform the acid and the water.
At any one time, only about 1% of the ethanoic acid molecules have converted into ions.
The rest remain as simple ethanoic acid molecules.
Most organic acids are weak. Hydrogen fluoride (dissolving in water to produce
hydrofluoric acid) is a weak inorganic acid that you may come across elsewhere.
Note: If you are interested in exploring organic acids further, you will find them explained elsewhere on
the site. It might be a good idea to read the rest of this page first, though.
If you want to know why hydrogen fluoride is a weak acid, you can find out by following this link. But
beware! The explanation is very complicated and definitely not for the faint-hearted!
These pages are in completely different parts of this site. If you follow either link, use the BACK button to
return to this current page.
The position of equilibrium of the reaction between the acid and water varies from one
weak acid to another. The further to the left it lies, the weaker the acid is.
Note: If you don't understand about position of equilibriumfollow this link before you go any further.
You are also going to need to know about equilibrium constants, Kc for homogeneous equilibria. There is
no point in reading any more of this page unless you do!
If you follow either link, use the BACK button to return to this current page.
However, if you think about this carefully, there is something odd about it.
At the bottom of the expression, you have a term for the concentration of the water in
the solution. That's not a problem - except that the number is going to be very large
compared with all the other numbers.
Note: 1 mole of water weighs 18 g. 1 dm 3 of solution contains approximately 1000 g of water. Divide
1000 by 18 to get approximately 55.
If you had a weak acid with a concentration of about 1 mol dm -3, and only about 1% of it
reacted with the water, the number of moles of water is only going to fall by about 0.01.
In other words, if the acid is weak the concentration of the water is virtually constant.
In that case, there isn't a lot of point in including it in the expression as if it were a
variable. Instead, a new equilibrium constant is defined which leaves it out. This new
equilibrium constant is called Ka.
Note: The term for the concentration of water hasn't just been ignored. What has happened is that the
first expression has been rearranged to give Kc (a constant) times the concentration of water (another
constant) on the left-hand side. The product of those is then given the name Ka.
You don't need to worry about this unless you really insist! All you need to do is to learn the format of the
expression for Ka.
You may find the Ka expression written differently if you work from the simplified version
of the equilibrium reaction:
It is actually exactly the same as the previous expression for Ka! Remember that
although we often write H+ for hydrogen ions in solution, what we are actually talking
about are hydroxonium ions.
This second version of the Ka expression isn't as precise as the first one, but your
examiners may well accept it. Find out!
To take a specific common example, the equilibrium for the dissociation of ethanoic acid
is properly written as:
These are all weak acids because the values for Ka are very small. They are listed in
order of decreasing acid strength - the Ka values get smaller as you go down the table.
However, if you aren't very happy with numbers, that isn't immediately obvious.
Because the numbers are in two parts, there is too much to think about quickly!
To avoid this, the numbers are often converted into a new, easier form, called pK a.
An introduction to pKa
pKa bears exactly the same relationship to Ka as pH does to the hydrogen ion
concentration:
If you use your calculator on all the Ka values in the table above and convert them into
pKa values, you get:
Note: Notice that unlike Ka, pKa doesn't have any units.
Notice that the weaker the acid, the larger the value of pKa. It is now easy to see the
trend towards weaker acids as you go down the table.
Remember this:
The lower the value for pKa, the stronger the acid.
The higher the value for pKa, the weaker the acid.
Note: If you need to know about Ka and pKa, you are quite likely to need to be able to do calculations
with them. You will probably need to be able to calculate the pH of a weak acid from its concentration and
Ka or pKa. You may need to reverse this and calculate a value for pKa from pH and concentration. I can't
help you with these calculations on this site, but they are all covered in detail in my chemistry calculations
book.
If this is the first set of questions you have done, please read theintroductory page before you start. You
will need to use the BACK BUTTON on your browser to come back here afterwards.
answers
To Main Menu . . .