Question

Concentrated nitric acid used in laboratory work is 68% nitric acid by mass in aqueous solution. What should be the molarity of such a sample of the acid if the density of the solution is 1.504 g/ml?

Answer 1

The first thing we need to do here is to recognize the unit of molarity and the units of the given percentage of nitric acid.

Molarity is mol HNO3 / L of solution. This is our aim

The given percentage is 0.68 g HNO3/ g solution

multiplying this with density to convert g solution into mL solution and dividing with the molecular weight of HNO3 (63 g/mol) to convert g HNO3 to mol. Therefore we obtain

0.016 mol/ mL or 16.23 mol/ L (M)