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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.
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 term is most often applied to liquids but also applies to solids and gases. An example in liquids is the miscibility of water and ethanol as they mix in all proportions. [1] By contrast, substances are said to be immiscible if the mixture does not form a solution for certain proportions.
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.
A vapor can exist in equilibrium with a liquid (or solid), in which case the gas pressure equals the vapor pressure of the liquid (or solid). A supercritical fluid (SCF) is a gas whose temperature and pressure are above the critical temperature and critical pressure respectively. In this state, the distinction between liquid and gas disappears.
A liquid is a nearly incompressible fluid that conforms to the shape of its container but retains a nearly constant volume independent of pressure. It is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, gas, and plasma), and is the only state with a definite volume but no fixed shape.
The IUPAC definition of a solid solution is a "solid in which components are compatible and form a unique phase". [3]The definition "crystal containing a second constituent which fits into and is distributed in the lattice of the host crystal" given in refs., [4] [5] is not general and, thus, is not recommended.
The two phases, known as an interface, can be classified into five categories, namely, solid-solid, solid-liquid, solid-gas, liquid-liquid and liquid-gas. [1] Although wetting solutions have a long history of acting as detergents for four thousand plus years, the fundamental chemical mechanism was not fully discovered until 1913 by the pioneer ...