What might cause the percent yield of sodium chloride to be less than 100%? How about when it is more than 100%? o.o

Question

anonymous · Answer

Is it because the percent yield of NaCl with less than 100% lost its impurities such as CO2, water, etc.

anonymous · Answer

balanced equation: NaHCO3 (s) + HCL (aq) -> NaCl (aq) + CO2 (g) + H2O (l)

xishem · Answer

No. If you have 1 mole of HCl and 1 mole of NaHCO3, the theoretical yield of NaCl is 1 mole.

However, some factors will give you less or more than 1 mole of the salt.

If your percent yield is greater than 100%, then there was an error in your experiment. If there are extra impurities that you aren't accounting for or wrong measurements, then you may get more than 100% yield.

If your yield is less than 100%, this is normal. This is caused by a few factors Losing some of your reagants when you transfer them between containers can cause this. This is why we generally try to minimize the number of transfers of chemicals we do. You're also going to get less than 100% because of equilibrium. Chemical reactions generally do not proceed 100% to the reactants side because of some type of equilibrium.

One example of this is the dissociation of a strong acid. Although it is generally accepted that a strong acid completely dissociates, this is really not the case. It just dissociates so much that the remaining strong acid in solution is negligible. However, other equilibriums are not so pushed towards reactants.

Make sense?

anonymous · Answer

ohh, i see. What does equilibrium mean?

xishem · Answer

Equilibrium is a topic you will go into great depth into in a Chem 2 class of some sort. Basically what it means is that no reaction proceeds 100% to the products. There is always a little bit of the reactants left if no special measures are taken.