NSW Titration Competition

On the 14th of June 2019, 8 teams from PLC embarked on a journey to the University of Sydney for the NSW Titration Competition, with three members on each team. This inter-school competition is open to students in Year 11 and 12. It requires its participants to accurately titrate, and hence find the concentration of three different solutions of a weak acid.

On starting the competition, we were given the concentration of HCl, and were asked to titrate HCl against a standard solution of NaOH with unknown concentration. Then, using the standard NaOH, each team member had to titrate it against solutions of Acetic acid. To make things harder, each team member was given different Acetic solutions to ensure that we can't double check our answers within a team.

The competition is 90 minutes in length, and the result for the competition was announced at the conclusion of the event. The closer a team is to determining the correct concentrations, the lower the team score. For example, if the correct concentration for solution A was 0.1010, and the team member's answer for solution A was 0.1016, this would yield an individual score of 36 :( The team score was then obtained from the sum of the individual scores. Overall, my team won second place and I achieved an individual score of 4.

After the NSW Titration competition, my team also qualified to compete nationally. Although there were some substitutions in place due to schedule clashes, our team worked wonderfully and placed sixth in the state.