The internal qualities of a substance can be altered to determine its chemical properties. Let’s see some examples:
- Flammability : The ease with which something will burn or combust. Information about how flammable a material can be is very important in many areas of life, such as construction, fire codes, as well as in the development of safety, storage, handling and transport requirements. of different materials according to their chemical composition.
- Heat of Combustion: It is the amount of energy that is released in the form of heat when a substance is burned with oxygen. It is important to know that all hydrocarbon combustion reactions result in carbon dioxide and water.
- Toxicity: Toxicity refers to how an animal, plant, cell, organ or other organism can be affected. The matter with recognized toxic properties are: lead, gaseous chlorine, hydrofluoric acid and mercury. Toxicity is measured by two factors, one is how much the substance damages the body and the other is how fast it does it.
- Ability to oxidize: this occurs with the gain of oxygen, loss of hydrogen, or loss of electrons. This chemical property is a consequence of the oxidation number of a substance. Iron, when exposed to the air, ends up oxidizing in an obvious way, but oxidation does not only happen in properly metallic substances, the darkening of the interior of an apple in the air is another form of oxidation.
- Radioactivity: The emission of radiation from an atom with an unstable nucleus is a chemical property. On the periodic table of elements, elements that do not have stable isotopes are considered radioactive.
- Chemical stability: reference is made as chemical stability in a specific environment, to the thermodynamic stability of a chemical system, it refers to the stability that occurs when a chemical system is at its lowest energy level, that is, in a state equilibrium or balance, with its environment. This situation will last permanently, until something happens that changes the environment.
- Half-life: This property is used mainly in chemistry and nuclear physics, to describe the time required for half of the unstable radioactive atoms to undergo radioactive decay.
Sources
- 1.3 Physical and Chemical Properties. (2021). openstax . Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/chemistry/chapter/physical-and-chemical-properties/
- Examples of Chemical Properties. (2021). Retrieved 30 March 2021, from https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-chemical-properties.html
