Question

How are neutralization equivalent lab procedures (i.e TITRATION of an aspirin and a FTIR test) concepts used in the real world? What function/purpose can they serve in manufacturing or testing? I would just like to understand why these types of lab testing are important/useful to everyday business.

 

Answer 1

Titrations are very much used in real life applications.

Say metal impurities in water as Ca2+ and Mg2+ are extracted by EDTA titrations.

This relates to purification of water technologies.

Also, other heavy metal impurities such as arsenic, chromium, cobalt etc which are present as trace elements are also identified and isolated, separated by complexometric titrations such as EDTA.

FTIR which is used to detect types of chemicals present based on functional groups are often used for forensic labs. When two compounds have exactly same FTIR spectrum, the compounds are also the same. This is used to identify impurities collected at the crime scene.

In aspirin, we do not have a free -OH group which shows a broad peak at around 3350 cm-1 in the IR spectrum. When an old sample of aspirin is taken, some of it has hydrolyzed to salicylic acid and this would show a broad peak for O-H stretch and tells us about purity of aspirin sample.