Three weeks ago my colleague and me conducted oral exams of student teachers (in chemistry). One of the tasks given to the students by me was calculating of the molar concentration for a concentrated solution of hydrochloric acid (36%) or sulfuric acid (about 100%), respectively.
Category Archives: Math
Howto: Fit sigmoid functions in OpenOffice Calc and Excel
Last week, I posted an article about sigmoid functions and how to use them. Nevertheless, it is hard to guess the parameters for a given problem. So, people use software such as Origin [1] or QtiPlot to fit.
Personally, I use Origin/QtiPlot only for plotting and Excel/OO–Calc for evaluation/calculation, because both programs are much more comfortable and powerful. However, both lack the possibility to fit sigmoid functions, automatically.
It is possible to do such fits for nearly any function using the solver, though, but only a few people I’ve met knew how to do this or that it is even possible. But, I think the solver is a very handy feature and, therefore, I want to give here a short introduction into using it for fitting a sigmoid function to a set of data.
This post is open to read and review on The Winnower.
References
- " OriginLab - Origin and OriginPro - Data Analysis and Graphing Software " http://www.originlab.com/
Analysis: Sigmoid functions for data evaluation
Note: There was an error in the reverse formula (and maybe also with some of the values given). Frank pointed this out (see comments section below).
In analytical chemistry, linear regression or linear function is a common (maybe the most common) tool to describe the relationship between a measured signal and the concentration of an analyte. Even if the relationship is much more complex, one usually works in small ranges only where the assumption of linearity is convenient.
However, there are analytical problems, which cannot be solved with this simple approach. In this short article I want to introduce and present another useful function for data evaluation on the basis of a real example.