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A solvent is usually a liquid but can also be a solid, a gas, or a supercritical fluid. Water is a solvent for polar molecules, and the most common solvent used by living things; all the ions and proteins in a cell are dissolved in water within the cell. Major uses of solvents are in paints, paint removers, inks, and dry cleaning. [2]
Making a saline water solution by dissolving table salt in water.The salt is the solute and the water the solvent. In chemistry, a solution is defined by IUPAC as "A liquid or solid phase containing more than one substance, when for convenience one (or more) substance, which is called the solvent, is treated differently from the other substances, which are called solutes.
An ideal solution or ideal mixture is a solution that exhibits thermodynamic properties analogous to those of a mixture of ideal gases. [1] The enthalpy of mixing is zero [2] as is the volume change on mixing by definition; the closer to zero the enthalpy of mixing is, the more "ideal" the behavior of the solution becomes.
Air is an example of a solution as well: a homogeneous mixture of gaseous nitrogen solvent, in which oxygen and smaller amounts of other gaseous solutes are dissolved. Mixtures are not limited in either their number of substances or the amounts of those substances, though in most solutions, the solute-to-solvent proportion can only reach a ...
The solute can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas, while the solvent is usually solid or liquid. Both may be pure substances, or may themselves be solutions. Gases are always miscible in all proportions, except in very extreme situations, [3] and a solid or liquid can be "dissolved" in a gas only by passing into the gaseous state first.
Chemists remove gases from solvents when the compounds they are working on are possibly air- or oxygen-sensitive (air-free technique), or when bubble formation at solid-liquid interfaces becomes a problem. The formation of gas bubbles when a liquid is frozen can also be undesirable, necessitating degassing beforehand.
The hydrogen halides are diatomic molecules with no tendency to ionize in the gas phase (although liquified hydrogen fluoride is a polar solvent somewhat similar to water). Thus, chemists distinguish hydrogen chloride from hydrochloric acid. The former is a gas at room temperature that reacts with water to give the acid.
Diesel fuel is immiscible in water.The bright rainbow pattern is the result of thin-film interference.. Miscibility (/ ˌ m ɪ s ɪ ˈ b ɪ l ɪ t i /) is the property of two substances to mix in all proportions (that is, to fully dissolve in each other at any concentration), forming a homogeneous mixture (a solution).