Acid-Base Chemistry… at Home! Fun with Flavin!

One of my favourite sub-disciplines within general chemistry is acids and bases. While the tiresome titrations were tedious, I loved how the mere change in the concentration of hydronium ions or hydroxide ions resulted in radically different environments that could be made more or less extreme by further alterations—things could be changed back and forth, unlike the mono-directional transformation of bread to toast. Since I’m a big fan of shiny objects and colours, using pH-indicators always amused me, and it was one of the things I wanted to bring home. I learned that there were multiple pH-indicators out there, including one in red cabbage called ‘flavin’, which acts as an indicator, and, best of all, it produces a colour whether the solution is acidic xor basic—take that, phenolphthalein!
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Tags | Chemistry, Projects