I need more help. How can I tell if a compound is a non-electrolyte, weak electrolyte, or strong electrolyte?
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- Thread starter TheRundownRabbit
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Huh... unfortunately, this is another case of no hard and fast rule, especially with respect to salts.
Not sure what level of education you're at, but assuming high school, most strong acids/bases you'll be dealing with will be strong electrolytes. But because of complexation, transition metals will behave quite differently from group1/2 metals so salts tend to be difficult to predict unless you know particular ions' tendencies to take on covalent character when bonding (hence why the strong ionic solutions are exactly that... solutions as the hydroxide and hydrogen ions are heavily ionic in bonding character).
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/bad explanation...
Not sure what level of education you're at, but assuming high school, most strong acids/bases you'll be dealing with will be strong electrolytes. But because of complexation, transition metals will behave quite differently from group1/2 metals so salts tend to be difficult to predict unless you know particular ions' tendencies to take on covalent character when bonding (hence why the strong ionic solutions are exactly that... solutions as the hydroxide and hydrogen ions are heavily ionic in bonding character).
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/bad explanation...
You pour it into water and see it's dissociation, if the compound dissociates into it's ionic forms completely, and the more ions it produces when it dissociates the stronger the ionic strength. Weak is if the compound doesn't dissociate completely and non-ionic would be if the compound doesn't produce ionic components.