Friday, July 8

Noorul Huda

Factors That Influence Acidity




There are many factors that determine acidity of a compound, here in this post I’ve made it condensed, below stated factors influence acidity of a compound

Factor 1 – Charge.

Removal of a proton, H+, decreases the formal charge on an atom or molecule by one unit. This is, of course, easiest to do when an atom bears a charge of +1 in the first place, and becomes progressively more difficult as the overall charge becomes negative. The acidity trends reflect this:


Note that once a conjugate base (B-) is negative, a second deprotonation will make the dianion (B 2-). While far from impossible, forming the dianion can be difficult due to the buildup of negative charge and the corresponding electronic repulsions that result.

Factor 2 – The Role of the Atom

This point causes a lot of confusion due to the presence of two seemingly conflicting trends.
Here’s the first point: acidity increases as we go across a row in the periodic table. This makes sense, right? It makes sense that HF is more electronegative than H2O, NH3, and CH4 due to the greater electronegativity of fluorine versus oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. A fluorine bearing a negative charge is a happy fluorine.
But here’s the seemingly strange thing. HF itself is not a “strong” acid, at least not in the sense that it ionizes completely in water. HF is a weaker acid than HCl, HBr, and HI. What’s going on here?

You could make two arguments for why this is.  The first reason has to do with the shorter (and stronger) H-F bond as compared to the larger hydrogen halides. The second has to do with the stability of the conjugate base. The fluoride anion, F(–) is a tiny and vicious little beast, with the smallest ionic radius of any other ion bearing a single negative charge. Its charge is therefore spread over a smaller volume than those of the larger halides, which is energetically unfavorable: for one thing, F(–) begs for solvation, which will lead to a lower entropy term in the ΔG.
Note that this trend also holds for H2O and H2S, with H2S being about 10 million times more acidic.

Factor #3 – Resonance.

A huge stabilizing factor for a conjugate base is if the negative charge can be delocalized through resonance. The classic examples are with phenol (C6H5OH) which is about a million times more acidic than water, and with acetic acid (pKa of ~5).



Factor #4 – Inductive effects

Electronegative atoms can draw negative charge toward themselves, which
can lead to considerable stabilization of conjugate bases. Check out these examples:


Predictably, this effect is going to be related to two major factors: 1) the electronegativity of the element (the more electronegative, the more acidic) and the distance between the electronegative element and the negative charge.

Factor #5 – Orbitals

Again, the acidity relates nicely to the stability of the conjugate base. And the stability of the conjugate base depends on how well it can accomodate its newfound pair of electrons. In an effect akin to electronegativity, the more s character in the orbital, the closer the electrons will be to the nucleus, and the lower in energy (= stable! ) they will be.




There’s actually a mnemonic that can help you remember these effects.
Charge
Atom
Resonance
Dipole Induction
Orbitals
= CARDIO.

Noorul Huda

About Noorul Huda -

A chemist, a teacher and a passionate blogger. Currently pursuing his PhD from School of Chemistry, University of Hyderabad is creative head of this blog and lives with a motto of teaching what he knows and exploring what he don't.

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