Why would you use a titration method when making potassium sodium and ammonium salts rather then just reacting the acid with large amounts of sodium hydroxide or something?

Answer 1

If you simply dump reactants together without careful measurements then you will have something left over.

Say you want to make sodium nitrate by reacting sodium hydroxide with nitric acid. The two chemicals react in a 1:1 ration, meaning that one mole of sodium hydroxide reacts with one mole of nitric acid; no more, no less. If you simply dump a vat of nitric acid into a vat of sodium hydroxide you don't know how much of each substance you are mixing and chances are you will have more of one than the other. If there is more nitric acid than sodium hydroxide, then there will by nitric acid left over. You get a similar problem if you end up adding to much sodium hydroxide. The end result is that the product you want is contaminated by an excess of one reactant and you have wasted chemicals.

If you titrate you will be able to mix together your reactants in exactly the right amounts (within a small margin of error) so that the end product is as pure as you can make it and you waste as little of your reactants as you can.