What Are The Specific Heat Of Naoh And The Enthalpy Of A Neutralization Reaction

In the lab the goal of measuring the specific heat of NaOH and the enthalpy change of a neutralization reaction between NaOH (strong base) and HCl (weak acid) was accomplished. This was accomplished by finding the heat of solution of the salt and measuring the heat capacity of the calorimeter to measure the enthalpy. During this lab one of the assumption that was made was the law of conservation of energy. Specifically, the loss of heat is equal to heat gained. The heat of solution with the assumption no heat loss was -43.884KJ/mol and with the heat loss to the calorimeter was -42.816KJ/mol. This value is not far off from the theoretical value of NaOH, which is -44.2KJ/mol, meaning there was only about a 3% error. When calculating the heat of solution of the salt, a couple of

Furthermore, the value attained for the calorimeter constant was 0.1748 KJ/°C, this value allowed to apply the correction for heat loss to the calorimeter. However, during the calculation for the calorimeter constant, the assumption that the specific heat of water was 4.184 J 〖deg〗^(-1) g^(-1). The concentration of NaOH was attained when assuming no heat loss was 0.8170 M and including the heat loss the concentration of NaOH was 0.9493 M. These values are very close to the expected value of the concentration, which is 1.071M considering the experimental error is only about 11 percent off. Based off the values obtained in the experiment compared to the theoretical values, there is a very little experimental error, meaning the method was precise. Therefore, the calorimeter was efficient method of measuring the change in temperature because it allowed chemical and physical process to occur, while being isolated. Some of the errors that may have occurred causing the result not to be as precise, is that our eyes are not a precise measuring