Chemical Equation Balancer, Needs Improvement
Written by WTJ on March 25, 2008 – 9:33 am -Stumbled this Chemical Equation Balancer and I thought it will eases chemistry students’ life. But…
2H2 + O2 –> 2H2O
That is the simplest and yet the balancer can’t do it. It can only do those equations given in the examples.
H2O is the water equation (just in case you don’t know). Some of you might wonder why the chemical equation to form a water molecule is 2H2 + O2 –> 2H2O.
The fact is, in nature, both hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) exist in diatomic molecules, which also means each hydrogen molecule is consisted of 2 hydrogen atoms. In order to form water,
H2 + O2 –> H2O
However, you can see that the above equation is not balance. The sum of H2 and O2 should be H2O2, but we want H2O. We need to do some simple maths to balance the equation. All we need to do is adding a 2 in front of H2 and a 2 in front of H2O.
2H2 + O2 –> 2H2O
The 2 in front of the 2H2 means there are 2 hydrogen molecules ( H2 +H2 ). So,
H2 + H2 + O2 –> H2O + H2O
2H2 + O2 –> 2H2O
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Tags: chemical equation, chemical equation balancer, H2O, water |
March 29th, 2008 at 7:31 am
The website is not designed to predict the outcomes of a reaction, it’s meant to balance the reaction. So instead of typing “2H2 + O2″ (which isn’t a complete equation), you should type “H2 + O2 + H2O”, and that will result in the correct answer.
It’s silly to type in “2H2 + O2″ because you are already assuming that you are putting in 2 hydrogen molecules, but if you are trying to BALANCE the reaction then you don’t know that: all you know are the reactants and the products.
March 29th, 2008 at 8:27 am
berkeley: thanks for the tips.