Development of IoT-enabled automatic titration system for affordable chemistry education
摘要
The low-cost and automatic chemical analysis systems can pave the way for the democratization of science education and improve the inquiry-based learning of resource-limited institutes/students. Given this, the present work reports the design and development of a microcontroller and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled low-cost automatic titration system for undergraduate chemistry laboratory courses. The total cost of the system is less than 50 USD. The system is based on an open-source Arduino-Uno hardware platform and can measure the concentration of the solution under test. For remote monitoring of results, we have employed IoT technology. For system functioning, a servomotor-driven 3D printed piston burette was designed to perform discrete addition of titrant volume. The endpoint was detected by using pH measurements. Based on the titrant volume added, the concentration of the analyte can be automatically calculated. The final results can be displayed on the liquid crystal display (LCD) and IoT dashboard. The system was tested by performing titrations for strong acid-strong base, weak acid-strong base, strong acid-weak base, and weak acid-weak base. The results were compared with standard laboratory experiment procedures, and the results are in good agreement with each other. Therefore, the proposed automatic titration system is suitable for chemistry laboratory courses.