Intro to Redox Reactions - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
Get help from an AI Tutor
Ask a question to get started.
1
concept
Identifying Redox Reactions
Video duration:
3m
Play a video:
In this video, we're gonna talk about redox reactions, 1st from a GenCap perspective and then from an organic chemistry perspective. Now recall that redox reactions, also known as oxidation reduction reactions, involve transference of an electron or electrons between reactants. Now, this is our general chemistry definition of a redox reaction. In organic chemistry, it's a little bit different. Here, redox reactions involve increasing or decreasing the oxygen or hydrogen amount on a molecule. Now, when we say oxidation, oxidation involves increasing the number of carbon oxygen bonds on the molecule. And if we're talking about reduction, well, that involves increasing the number of carbon hydrogen bonds on the molecule. If we take a look here at oxidation versus reduction, we're gonna see that on the far left side, we have a hydrocarbon, in the form of methane. And then on the far right side, we have carbon dioxide here. Notice that they're both grayed out. That's because we don't really deal with these two types of compounds when we're talking about oxidation versus reduction. We're gonna focus on the middle portion, where we're going between an alcohol to to what looks like an aldehyde to a carboxylic acid. That's the portion that we care about in terms of organic chemistry. Now here, we can oxidize a hydrocarbon to our alcohol, and notice that we had no carbon oxygen bonds initially, but our first oxidation step creates our first carbon oxygen bond. So this would be for alcohols. If we continue with our oxidation process, we have 1 carbon oxygen bond, now we have 2. Because we're double bonded to that oxygen. Now here, I'm showing an aldehyde, but this section here stands for aldehydes and ketones. Now, if we continue with oxidizing this, we get a carboxylic acid, And we go from being 2 carbon oxygen bonds to now 3. And if we continued further, we get carbon dioxide, which has 4 carbon oxygen bonds. But again, we don't concern ourselves with that portion, because that doesn't really, represent an organic molecule for us. Now going the opposite way, we're reducing, we're starting out with the carboxylic acid, we then move over to the aldehyde or ketone section here. Notice that we go from 3 Carbon Oxygen Bonds to now just 2. And not just that, we're increasing the number of Carbon Hydrogen Bonds, Because here, we only had 1 carbon hydrogen bond, and now we're back to 2. Continue onward again, now instead of having 2 Carbon Ox, Carbon Hydrogens, we have 3. And we're at the alcohol phase. And if we continued on, we have, 4 carbon hydrogen bonds. But again, we're not concerned with the extremes in terms of this image, we don't concern ourselves with hydrocarbons or carbon dioxide. We're operating in the highlighted section in the middle, between alcohols, aldehydes and ketones, and carboxylic acids.
2
example
Intro To Redox Reactions Example
Video duration:
1m
Play a video:
Determine if the following reaction represents an oxidation or reduction reaction. If we take a look here, we're gonna say that we have, as far as we can see, 1 carbon oxygen bond, and we have 1 carbon hydrogen bond here. Now here this is just a regular carbon carbon bond, and this is just a regular carbon carbon bond, so we don't look at those. Now we're focusing on this carbon because we can see that it undergoes a change here. So that's where we're focusing on it. So we're gonna say here we're starting out with 1 carbon oxygen and 1 Carbon Hydrogen. If we come over here, what's happened? Well, we can see that this Carbon which is still the same Carbon here, it has lost its Carbon Hydrogen bond. So it has 0 of those now. And now instead of being connected to oxygen just once, it's now connected to it twice. So we have increased the number of carbon oxygen bonds. And we know when we do that, that's a sign of oxidation. So here we'd say that this reaction represents an oxidation reaction. We have an alcohol that's been oxidized into a ketone product.
3
Problem
Problem
Determine if the following reaction represents an oxidation, reduction or neither.
A
Oxidation
B
Reduction
C
Neither
4
Problem
Problem
Determine if the following reaction represents an oxidation, reduction or neither.
A
Oxidation
B
Reduction
C
Neither
Do you want more practice?
We have more practice problems on Intro to Redox Reactions