Question

1. The preparation of nanoparticle solutions adds a reducing reagent, sodium borohydride, to an oxidizing agent, hydrogen peroxide. Is it concievable that these two reagents would react with each other?

2. Why is it important to force the regression line in the Beer's Law plot of absorbance vs. concentration to go through the origin? Would adding the point (0,0) to your data set have the same effect? Why or why not?

Answer 1

1. sodium borohydride with hydrogen peroxide decomposition reaction

Accordingly, the net cell reaction can be written as:
NaBH4+ 8 NaOH + 4 H2O2+ 4 H2SO4 ?NaBO2+ 14 H2O + 4 Na2SO4

Hydrogen production from solid sodium borohydride with hydrogen peroxide decomposition reaction for a fuel cell based air-independent propulsion system in space and underwater applications. Sodium borohydride in the solid state was used as a hydrogen source in the present study. Pure hydrogen could be generated by a catalytic hydrolysis reaction in which the water source was obtained from the hydrogen peroxide decomposition. Hydrogen peroxide was selected as an oxidizer, being decomposed catalytically to generate oxygen and water. The pure oxygen was provided to a fuel cell and the water was stored separately for the hydrolysis reaction. A fuel cell system was fabricated to validate the fuel cell based air-independent power system proposed in the present study. Two catalytic reactors were prepared; one for the solid sodium borohydride hydrolysis reaction and the other for the hydrogen peroxide decomposition reaction.

2.  It important to force the regression line in the Beer's Law plot of absorbance vs. concentration to go through the origin

i.e. Make sure to FORCE your best fit line to go through the origin

Beer's Law has an intercept through the origin, so your best fit line should reflect that.

Another way to find the slope of a line, when you do not have a fitting program available, on a test for example, would be to calculate the slope. This would give you a less accurate slope, but would still be acceptable when a fitting program is not available.