Did you know you can turn sodium acetate into “hot ice”? It is exactly what happens within a chemical heating pack! Inside that pack, along with water, is a solution that has more sodium acetate that can normally be dissolved at room temperature. Sodium acetate is the sodium salt of acetic acid. This solution is called a saturated solution because it contains the maximum amount of sodium acetate that can be dissolved without heating the solution (1).
What is in a solution is a solute, which is the component in a solution, dissolved in the solvent. The solute is the element that is going to be dissolved. The solvent is the liquid in which a solute is dissolved to form a solution. The solvent is the element that is going to dissolve the solute. A solution can become supersaturated if you add more solute to it while the temperature is being increased. When a liquid is heated up, the molecules and
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Because salt can be dissolved in water, it is said to have high solubility. Sodium acetate also dissolves very easily in water, especially in warm water, so it has high solubility too(1). There are 2 ways to change the solubility of a solution. One way to change it is to raise the temperature because at higher temperatures most solids are extra soluble. The increase of temperature has 2 effects on almost all solutes that are solid. They dissolve more quickly, and a greater amount of the solution dissolves.
The other way to change the solubility, is when the solution is a gas, is to change the pressure. At high pressure the gas solubility in a liquid solvent increases(1). However, for gases. the opposite is true. A rise in temperature makes a gas less soluble in water. For example, when you boil water as it reaches its boiling point, any air that has been dissolved in the water comes out of the solution in