What are the advantages of electronic burette over a digital or glass burette?
Innovation and technology play a vital role in laboratory science to increase safety of lab technicians and improve the precision and accuracy of test results. Well designed instruments not only provide high precision in the lab, but also improve the productivity of the scientists by reducing the time required to conduct experiments. Electronic Burette is one such technology innovation which has improved the precision of titration experiments in the laboratory.
A titration is a technique that is used to determine the concentration of an unknown solution with the solution of known concentration. Typically, the titrant (the known solution) is added from an instrument called Burette to a known quantity of the analyte until the reaction is complete. Volume of titrant added by the Burette, allows the determination of the concentration of the analyte (the unknown solution). Burette gives the control for adding solution with a stopcock so that we can find the exact time of process completion with reading of added titrant given on a glass tube.
Burettes are widely used in many industries like Pharmaceutical, Environmental Monitoring, and Food & Beverages specially for ensuring accuracy for industrial titrations, general chemistry and wastewater treatment applications.
Application of titration experiment?
Purity analysis – in which acid-base titrations are often used. A good example is the purity control of the drug ephedrine, found in some cough syrups. An acid called perchloric acid is used as the titrant in this reaction.
Content analysis – wherein redox (oxidation-reduction) reactions are used to establish the purity of raw materials, including binding substances in oral medications, rather than the end product itself.
Precipitation titrations – which result in the formation of a solid product. One example is the antifungal drug clotrimazole.
The pH-stat titration – which is used to determine the acidity of drugs, check the purity of enzymes made and investigate the speed and other characteristics of relevant chemical reactions.
Traditional Titration Methods and their limitations:
Traditional Glass Burettes are graduated glass tubes with a tap at one end and a stopcock to control the flow of known concentrated liquid in the titration process. The glass burette has a tapered capillary tube at the stopcock’s outlet and a printed graduated scale that enables the lab scientist to precisely determine how much liquid has been dispensed in the titration process. However glass burettes have certain limitations. For instance, it is extremely unsafe to manually pour hazardous titrants with the risk of spillage and leakage. Also, it is hard to achieve high precision since the dispensing speed has to be manually controlled near the titration end point.
To overcome the shortcoming of glass burettes, Digital Burettes are one of the widely used electronic instruments. They have digital read-out to indicate the amount of titrant dispensed. Filling and dispensing of the liquid is controlled by hand operated wheels instead of the stopcock valve. This solves the problem of leakage as prevalent in glass burettes.
In spite of significant improvement over glass burettes, Digital Burettes have some disadvantages. The hand wheels fixed on the two sides of the digital burette have to be manually rotated to perform the filling and dispensing operations. This may be tiresome and un-ergonomic. Also, when the endpoint of the titration is near, the manual wheel rotation does not provide drop by drop dispense control. This may result in inaccuracy in the final titration reading and experiment conclusions.
Advantages of Electronic Burette:
Microlit Electronic Burette or E-Burette is an advanced version of digital burette that is designed for precise handling and dispensing of liquid. It completely eliminates the shortcomings prevalent with traditional titration methods. Electronic Burette has several advanced features like motor-controlled piston movement, touch screen enabled control panel integrated with smooth and easy graphical user interface (GUI) and three pre-set speed to perform more accurate titrant dispensing:
High Speed Dispensing — it dispenses at 2.20 ml/sec
Low-Speed Dispensing — it dispenses at 0.75 ml/sec
These pre-set dispensing speed helps to control the liquid for correct measurement at the end point of titration. With the dropwise option in E-Burette, users can dispense droplets as small as 0.01ml which is very hard to obtain and control by other normal burettes.
Microlit E-Burette also have advanced following features that improve the instrument user experience:
One touch filling – No manual operations required
Computer connectivity to securely store and transfer experiment readings
Adjustable Delivery Nozzle
Robust Control Panel for optimal user experience
High Chemical Compatibility with a wide range of reagents
Microlit E-Burette is a worthwhile upgrade from your traditional titration methods to improve the safety, user experience and precision of your test results.
