Concentration units show the amount of material in a substance and can be described in various ways. The most common method is “parts per million” and “concentrated” and “diluted” are common marketing terms. Molarity and molality are the most specific methods and are used in chemical mixing. The exact composition is usually irrelevant for laymen and marketing purposes. Moles are used in chemistry as a specific quantity in concentration units.
A unit of concentration is a way of showing the amount of material present within another substance. There are a staggering amount of terms for different methods of noting a concentration unit, but it will generally fall into one of three different areas. A common marketing term is the use of “concentrated” and “diluted” as a way to show relative rather than specific concentration. The most common general method is to describe the solute in terms of the solvent; basically, “five parts per million.” The last method, molarity and molality, is the most specific and is widely used in chemical mixing.
Of actual unit specific concentration measurements, “parts of solute per amount of solvent” is generally the most common format. A mixture of two materials is called a solution and the solute is the smaller of the two while the solvent is the larger. This description is typically in parts per million, billion or trillion (ppm/b/t). The metering does not use actual defined amounts to provide scalability. If one person wants one portion to be a single drop and another wants it to be a full glass, the figures are simply scaled to match.
For the layman and for marketing purposes, the exact composition of a material is usually irrelevant. When a shopper purchases orange juice, it is more important for him to know whether it is concentrated or premixed rather than the amount of one component versus another. For this reason, the most common general unit of concentration is simply “concentrate”. This label is placed on a variety of products to show that the material is separate from unprocessed versions of its genre. The opposite label, “diluted,” is less common but has the same idea.
If an experimenter put drops of ink in water, then the drops would be the part, the solute would be the ink, and the water would be the solvent. One ppm of ink would go into about 14 gallons (53 liters) of water, or about a quarter of a standard 55-gallon pail. One ppb would require an entire tank truck and one ppt would require over 12,000,000 gallons (over 45,000,000 liters) of water.
The last common type of unit of concentration uses moles, a basic measure used in chemistry. In many ways, it’s like the ppm format – it just uses moles as the specific quantity on the more flexible part descriptor. In this style, molarity is the number of moles of solute relative to the whole solution, and molality is the number of moles of solute relative to the solvent.
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