Class: BE-210
Group: R7
Members: Pedram Afshar, Jeffrey Berman, Jess LeMay
Date: Spring 1998
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Abstract:
The purpose of this project was to design and build an automated titration system capable of constructing a titration curve and calculating pKa points for a wide range of compounds. TITRON, the automated titration system, was constructed in the Bioengineering Laboratory using three available components: LabVIEW 4.1, a syringe pump, and a digital pH meter. The syringe pump and digital pH meter were independently tested to determine their functionality and error. The syringe pump was found to be able to provide a constant flow of 45.33 + 0.28 microL/second. The pH meter is able to report data through a serial port to LabVIEW once a second. At this data transfer rate and the syringe pump’s flow rate, the pH of the titration solution changed an average of 0.025 per second, producing a smooth and continuous titration curve. During six trial titrations of amino acids, the syringe pump provided a constant flow of NaOH while the pH meter exported the pH at 1 Hz and LabVIEW collected the data. A separate LabVIEW virtual instrument was then used to analyze the data from the titration curve and find the inflection points corresponding to the pKa points of Alanine and Valine. The measured pKa points were consistently less than 3% different from accepted values. (3)