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In chemistry, a formula unit is the smallest unit of a non-molecular substance, such as an ionic compound, covalent network solid, or metal. [1] [2] It can also refer to the chemical formula for that unit. Those structures do not consist of discrete molecules, and so for them, the term formula unit is used.
The ionic strength of a solution is a measure of the concentration of ions in that solution. Ionic compounds , when dissolved in water, dissociate into ions. The total electrolyte concentration in solution will affect important properties such as the dissociation constant or the solubility of different salts .
For most ionic compounds dissolved in water, the van 't Hoff factor is equal to the number of discrete ions in a formula unit of the substance. This is true for ideal solutions only, as occasionally ion pairing occurs in solution. At a given instant a small percentage of the ions are paired and count as a single particle.
The circumstances under which a compound will have ionic or covalent character can typically be understood using Fajans' rules, which use only charges and the sizes of each ion. According to these rules, compounds with the most ionic character will have large positive ions with a low charge, bonded to a small negative ion with a high charge. [25]
A chemical formula used for a series of compounds that differ from each other by a constant unit is called a general formula. It generates a homologous series of chemical formulae. For example, alcohols may be represented by the formula C n H 2n + 1 OH (n ≥ 1), giving the homologs methanol, ethanol, propanol for 1 ≤ n ≤ 3.
The calculated lattice energy gives a good estimation for the Born–Landé equation; the real value differs in most cases by less than 5%. Furthermore, one is able to determine the ionic radii (or more properly, the thermochemical radius) using the Kapustinskii equation when the lattice energy is known.
For ionic compounds made of molecular cations and/or anions, there may also be ion-dipole and dipole-dipole interactions if either molecule has a molecular dipole moment. The theoretical treatments described below are focused on compounds made of atomic cations and anions, and neglect contributions to the internal energy of the lattice from ...
For example, the empirical formula of ethanol may be written C 2 H 6 O, [11] because the molecules of ethanol all contain two carbon atoms, six hydrogen atoms, and one oxygen atom. Some types of ionic compounds, however, cannot be written as empirical formulas which contains only the whole numbers.