So I have to make a green cleaner for a project in chemistry. I think my ingredients should be: vinegar, salt, water, and lemon juice. But I don't know how I would write that exactly as a chemical formula. How could I write a chemical equation if I have 4 reactants? I can try to come up with the equation if I know how to do it, I'd really appreciate help :))
Must you write an equation?
What about just writing the formulas for vinegar, salt, water, and citric acid. Most of these clean particular agents so you only need to write the equation between that specific chemical and the particular dirty spot it works on. That's if you need to write at equation at all.
Basically, I need to write an equation so I can find the moles and then find the concentrations. I need to create a cleaner for class and I need to do calculations. So like if i did:
CH3COOH + C6H8O7 +H2O
acetic acid in vinegar + citric acid in lemon juice + water... what would be on the products side? are they even reacting together? i'm just really confused about this
No, and that was the point of my response. They don't necessarily react together. The acetic acid MAY just provide an acidic medium, the lemon juice may just react with grease, the water may just clean those materials soluble in water, etc. Since you don't really ever know exactly how much of that spilled material is grease and how much is soda, it would be difficult to calculate reaction moles anyway. But you could make your cleaner strong enough to clean almost any quantity and specify that acetic acid is 10M (10 mols in a liter of solution) and do the same for the others. I'm just trying to get around writing an overall equation because I don't think one exists.
OH I see what you mean. So I don't really need a set chemical equation. The question on my page says that I must have "the concentrations of the active ingredients. List the concentrations of all active cleaning ingredients, and all calculations involved in determining them". But how could I figure out the concentrations in relation to one another? Like, if I have 10M of acetic acid, how am I supposed to know how much vinegar I'm supposed to have? (thank you for helping me, by the way)
Your question in print now makes a lot more sense. All you need to do is to list the concentrations of each reagent. I would do that in molarity.
For acetic acid, you put in 60 g and that will be 1 M if the total volume is 1L. (Remember vinegar will be about 5% stuff AND it has a volume so the volume will need to taken into effect.)
58.5 g NaCl in 1L is 1M
etc down the line. So it is no problem to list the concentrations of all of the chemicals. You don't need to worry about anything but the amount of the chemical and the FINAL volume. The simple way to do it is to decide you will make 1 L of cleaner.
58.5g NaCl is 1 mole so the final concn NaCl will be 1M.
60 g CH3COOH is 1 mol (but it will take more calculation since you will be using vinegar and not acetic acid). What I would do is use say 500 mL vinegar and if the bottle says it is 5%, then the final concn will be 5% x 500/1000 = 2.5%. If your prof is satisfied with NaCl in M and vinegar in % you're home free; if not you will need to convert 2.5% to M acetic acid. Lemon juice is the same way, but I would use REAL LEMON or something like that. The bottle will tell you the percent you start with. When you finish you add enough water to make the final volume 1L (I would use a volumetric flask for that---that way the prof can't complain about the reagent volumes not being additive. They aren't and you correct for that when you add enough H2O to make the final volume = 1L. ;-).
Thank you so incredibly much of helping me, it all makes so much more sense than it did before. I get what you're saying with the vinegar and percentage but now I'm just wondering how you got 60 g as 1M if the total volume is 1L for acetic acetic acid?? How could I find those numbers using calculations??
1 mol CH3COOH in 1L = 1M
2C = 2*12 = 24
4 H = 4*1 = 4
2 O = 2*16 = 32
Total = 60
That's if you use acetic acid and not vinegar.
When you say M, you're talking about the molar mass, not mol/L, right (my chef teacher uses M for both). And 1 mole of any element is an amount equal to its atomic mass in grams so that makes way more sense. Well thank you very much and have a good night :)
Yes, when I write M that is molarity in moles/L. M = molarity.
I ALWAYS write the words molar mass out since there is no official abbreviation.
The atomic mass in grams is 1 mol of any element.
The molar mass in grams of any compound is 1 mole of that compound.
So I've made my cleaner, and I only had 300 ml of vinegar at home. The mass is 283g. So I found out the moles by doing
283g x (1 mol / 60.06g) = 4.71 mol
The 60.06 was the molar mass of vinegar
I found the concentration by doing c=n/v
c= 4.71 mol / 300 ml
Do I do c=n/v by using the volume of the vinegar or the overall volume of my solution?
To find the percent of acetic acid in the vinegar (it's 5% on the bottle), I would do 5% x 300/1000= 1.5%, right?
Thank you so much