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Indigestion
Name: teresa
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
I want to do an experiment to see which antacid works
best.How can I
simulate stomach acid? Should I mix acidic foods like vinegar and
orange juice together. I don't have access to chemicals like HCl unless
it is available in something I'm not aware of.
Replies:
Try muriatic acid which you can buy at the hardware store.
Hi Daniel...a solution of hydrochloric acid is not
so difficult to get...try asking your science
teacher at school.
But if your idea is to compare antiacids only by their
antiacidic effect maybe you can do some experiments
with other acids that you find at the kitchen, like as you
said orange or lemon juice (citric acid) , vinegar (acetic
acid).Be aware that even if you get a solution of hydro-
chloric acid you are not reproducing the "real" conditions
of the stomach or the gastric juice, since there are other
substances involved, like the enzimes.
But in any case you must have a way to show the resultant
pH, like seeing the color with a Litmus paper.
Hope that this answers your question, and thanks for
asking Newton.
Mabel
(Dr. Mabel Rodrigues)
Vinegar would be a good chemical to use to test antacids. Use the
distilled white vinegar.
It's dangerous to work with, but you or your parents could probably get
fairly concentrated hydrochloroc acid at the hardware store. It's sold as
"muriatic acid," and it is marketed for cleaning bricks and concrete. You
would have to dilute it to reach the strength of stomach acid - stomach
acid at its strongest is about pH 1, which is 0.1 moles/liter HCl. The
muriatic acid sold in the store is I think 40% HCl by weight. You would
need to find its density and figure its concentration in moles/liter, so
that you could calculate how much to dilute it to model stomach acid.
Richard Barrans Jr., Ph.D.
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Update: June 2012
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