About this video
A physical change can alter a substance's properties without changing its composition, while a chemical change rearranges how atoms are bonded. Ice melting and water boiling are physical changes because only intermolecular forces are overcome, whereas propane burning and iron rusting are chemical changes because chemical bonds break and new ones form.
You'll be able to
- distinguish physical changes from chemical changes.
- explain that physical changes overcome intermolecular forces while chemical changes break and form chemical bonds.
- classify melting, boiling, combustion and rusting as physical or chemical changes.
Key words
- physical change
- A change in properties, like state, without any change in what the substance is made of.
- chemical change
- A change where bonds between atoms break and form, so new substances with a different composition are made.
- composition
- Which atoms a substance is made of and how they are bonded together.
- intermolecular forces
- Attractions between separate molecules, which are overcome when a substance melts or boils.
- combustion
- Burning: a reaction with oxygen that releases a lot of energy, like propane in a flame.
Transcript
- [Instructor] So what we have are three different pictures of substances undergoing some type of change. And what we're gonna focus on in this video is classifying things as either being physical changes or chemical changes. And you might already have already thought about this or seen this in a previous science class, but when we talk about a physical change, we're talking about where there could be a change in properties but we're not having a change in the actual composition of what we're talking about.
While in a chemical change, you actually do have a change in composition, how the different constituent atoms and elements match up or connect or bond to each other might be different. So my first question to you is pause this video, and we have some ice melting here, we have some propane combusting or burning here, and we have some iron rusting here.
And I want you to think about which of these are physical changes and which of these are chemical changes and why. All right, now let's first think about this water, this ice melting. And if we wanted to write it in fancy chemical language or chemistry language, we could write this as H2O going from its solid form to H2O going into its liquid form.
Now we don't have a change in composition. In either state, whether you're looking at this liquid water here or whether you're looking at the solid water there, you'll see a bunch of water molecules. Each oxygen is still bonded to two hydrogens and so you're not having a change in composition, and so this over here is a physical change.
And if we kept heating that water up and it started to vaporize, that would also be a physical change. Whereas it turns into water vapor, you have your intermolecular forces being overcome but the covalent bonds between the oxygens and the hydrogens, those aren't breaking or forming in some way.
So once again, when you go from ice to water, physical change. From water to vapor, or you could say from liquid to gas, that is also going to be a physical change. One general rule of thumb, when you think about what's going on on a microscopic level, and this is a general rule of thumb, it doesn't always apply and we'll think about an edge case in a little bit, is when you're overcoming intermolecular forces, that tends to be a physical change.
But if you have chemical bonds forming or breaking, that would be a chemical change. Now let's think about what's going on here with the propane. If you were to write the chemical reaction here, it would be propane, C3H8 in gas form. It needs oxygen to combust, so for every mole of propane, we have five moles of molecular oxygen in gas form.
And then when it combusts, you're going to produce three, for every one mole of propane and five moles of molecular oxygen, you're gonna produce three moles of carbon dioxide gas, and four moles of water in vapor form as well. And so what you actually have is the bonds in those molecules are actually breaking and then reforming.
So you don't just have physical change going on here, you have chemical change. Chemical change. One way to think about it, you had propane here before, C3H8, after the reaction, you no longer have the propane here. What you actually see as fire, which is fascinating, this is just very hot gas.
And that very hot air that you're seeing, and there's going to be some carbon dioxide in there and there's going to be some water vapor in there, the reason why it's getting so hot is because this releases a lot of energy. Now let's think about what's going on here with this iron.
If I were to write this as a chemical reaction; for every four moles of iron in solid form plus three moles of molecular oxygen in gas form, and that would just be the ambient oxygen around this iron, it is going to produce two moles of iron oxide as a solid. And that's what you see there in the orange, that is the iron oxide.
So notice this reaction is forming new ionic bonds in that ferrous oxide. And to undergo the reaction, we had to break the metallic bonds of the solid iron and the covalent bonds in the molecular oxygen. So anytime we are breaking and making these chemical bonds, we have a chemical change.
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