Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I really need help!!! When I checked my current it said 7.1.. is that the number of electrolytes in the drink?
If not can someone tell me how I'm supposed to find the electrolytes in detail??? I need it really fast!

Hello, sciencegeek267. Could you clarify your experiment and question? It's hard to help without a full description of what you're doing.

Well Im trying too see if orange juice is a better alternative to sports drinks. I followed all of the step for the experiment. I used a multimeter to find the conductance and the drinks became numbers like 7.8, 8.3,14.5, etc. I want to know in detail how I am supposed to find the number of electrolytes in the drinks from these numbers. Following the step in the paper, I divided but got a number like 0.000000083, is this the number of electrolytes? How to I find the real number?

sciencegeek267 wrote: is this the number of electrolytes? How to I find the real number?

To answer you last question first, you won't be able to simply with the data you get from this experiment! Knowing the conductivity of a liquid does not tell you anything about any mixture of electrolytes in your samples. If your samples only had one chemical ion, example test solution of deionized water and NaCl (table salt), then the conductivity would relate directly to the specific known ion concentration. For sports drinks and orange juice, you have to know the chemical valence and relative concentration of each ion in the solution to be able to determine the electrolyte concentration from the conductance.

sciencegeek267 wrote:Well Im trying too see if orange juice is a better alternative to sports drinks.

These project ideas aren't "canned" Science Fair projects. In order to turn these ideas into a viable Science Fair project there is much more work to do in researching the subject area, figuring out what the proposed test methods allow you to measure, so that you can propose a hypothesis and experiment that might be able to prove or disprove your hypothesis. To scientifically answer the question of whether something is better than something else, you have to formulate an evaluation criterion.

What is the "best" car? Should price be a factor in making this judgement? Should number of passengers be a factor? Should how well it performs on a race track factor in? Should gas mileage matter? Should maintenance history of previous models matter? Best car to one person might be a totally unacceptable car to another because they have different judging criterion!

Now down to the numbers you gave. What are their units? Numbers are meaningless in scientific terms without units. You might be able to answer part of your own question if you can figure out what units to attach to your raw measurement numbers. In science and engineering when you do any mathmatical operation to convert numbers, you need to put down the units on all of the numbers you are operating with. You can't add or subtract numbers if they don't have the same units. When you multiply or divide, you do the same with the units which often leads to canceling out some units so the end result is a set of units that differs from those on either of the factors.