The question is: Hydrogen and oxygen gas combine explosively to produce water. Write a balanced chemical equation for this process. If 10 mol of hydrogen reacted with oxygen, what volume of liquid water could be produced?
Is this right for the balanced equation? 4H + O₂ → 2H₂O
Does the mole stay the same? Does 10 mol of hydrogen that has reacted with oxygen remain as 10 mol?
How do I go about working out the volume of water now?
Thank you.
H occurs as a diatomic molecule (as does oxygen) so the equation should be
2H2 + O2 ==> 2H2O
(10 moles H2 will produce 10 moles H2O --ONLY IF there is sufficient oxygen present and that will be 5 moles oxygen needed for 10 moles H2). 1 mole H2O has a molar mass of 18 grams; therefore, 10 moles will have a mass of 180 grams. If the density of water is 1.00 g/mL, that will be 180 mL water. Check my thinking.
The balanced chemical equation you provided is not correct. The correct balanced equation for the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to produce water is:
2H₂ + O₂ → 2H₂O
In this equation, you can see that two molecules of hydrogen (H₂) react with one molecule of oxygen (O₂) to produce two molecules of water (H₂O).
Now, let's move on to determine the volume of water produced. Although we are given the number of moles of hydrogen (10 mol), we need to consider the stoichiometry of the reaction to determine the mole ratio between hydrogen and water.
From the balanced equation, we can see that 2 moles of H₂ are required to produce 2 moles of H₂O. Therefore, the mole ratio of H₂ to H₂O is 2:2 or simply 1:1.
Since 1 mole of any gas occupies 22.4 liters at standard temperature and pressure (STP), we can use this information to calculate the volume of water produced.
1 mol of water (H₂O) → 22.4 L
Thus, 10 moles of hydrogen will produce 10 moles of water, which can be calculated as:
10 mol H₂ × (22.4 L/1 mol) = 224 L
Therefore, if 10 moles of hydrogen react with oxygen, approximately 224 liters of liquid water could be produced.
Note: The volume of water obtained in practice may vary due to several factors like temperature, pressure, and reaction efficiency.