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How Do We Know The Efficiency Of a Chemical Reaction

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Chemical Equation

If you’re a chemistry student, we assume that you already know how to make chemical compounds react with each other.

And, you probably also know how to balance your chemical equations representing the chemical reactions.

But how do you tell how efficient your reaction was? Sounds odd? Well yeah, sort of! After all, what really is the standard of efficiency that you measure your reaction against.

Turns out there is. And it is an extremely important concept in chemistry, and also equally thought evoking. It’s called ‘theoretical yield’ and it’s what you calculate for this very purpose.

Most students ask this question that if we have the actual yield of the reaction by actually carrying out the reaction then what’s the point of measuring theoretical yield calculator chemistry.

Well, theoretical yield is the metric which you compare actual yield with, to get the true efficiency of your reaction. Since efficiency is measured in percentage, so the formula for percentage yield calculator then goes like this:

Percent Yield = Actual Yield/Theoretical Yield * 100

Now that we have cleared how efficiency can be measured, let’s get a deeper look at the differences between theoretical yield and actual yield.

Theoretical yield differs from actual yield in the most interesting ways. Theoretical yield is the perfect yield we can get in theory but it is something that is never attained in the real world.

This is why we measure theoretical yield on paper, due to its realization being impossible in a lab.

Why is it never attainable in the real world? Well, the reason is that the real world contains a staggering number of variables that are not accounted for in measuring theoretical yield.

For instance, think of how many molecules of your reacting chemical compounds would be lost in reaction to the test tube glass. Yep, that happens, cool isn’t it.

So it’s these kinds of variables that are not accounted for in theoretical yield which measures the yield under perfect theoretical conditions in an isolated environment.

This is why theoretical yield is always more efficient than actual yield, and the closer the actual yield is to the theoretical yield, the more efficient the reaction is.

If it’s far lower than the former, that means that the reaction hasn’t been highly efficient and lab conditions are not properly optimized for chemical reactions.

Wrapping it up:

We’ve learned how to measure the efficiency of chemical reactions and what metrics are used for the purpose.

For this purpose, we first calculate the theoretical yield of a given chemical reaction and then we proceed to carry out the actual reaction that gives us the actual yield of the reaction.

We then compare the actual yield with the theoretical yield to get an idea about the efficiency of our reaction.

Finally, we learn the purpose of theoretical yield, which often confuses chemistry students. You can’t know how efficient a chemical reaction is, if you don’t know its theoretical yield.