Niobium reacts with fluorine at room temperature to give a solid binary compound that is 49.44% Nb by mass.

(c) The compound reacts with hydrogen to regenerate niobium. Write a balanced equation for the reaction.

Video transcript

All right. Hi, everyone. So this question says that at high temperatures, titanium combines with chlorine to form a crystalline substance composed of 40.31 per cent titanium by weight this substance when exposed to sodium reverts back to pure titanium metal, provide the balanced chemical equation for this reaction. Specifically, the reaction of are ha light here or the crystalline substance with sodium metal. Now recall that we cannot quite jump to conclusions when it comes to the molecular formula of or crystalline substance because titanium is a transition metal, which means that multiple oxidation states are possible. Therefore, the fact that the that we are given the percent weight of titanium is significant because it allows us to find the ratio of titanium to chlorine. The bottom line here is that we are first going to find the empirical formula of our crystalline compound by determining the ratio of titanium to chlorine. Now, if we assume that there are 100 g of this compound, then given the percentage, there are 40.31 g of titanium. So the remaining mass here again, assuming 100 g is going to be composed of chlorine. So 100 subtracted by the mass of titanium yields the mass of chlorine, which in this case is 59.69 g. But right, the idea is to find a ratio and we cannot do that based on just the mass. Rather, we have to take this a step further and convert from grams of titanium and chlorine to moles of titanium and chlorine. And to do this, we will multiply their mass or excuse me, divide their mass. Bye. It's molar mass specifically with titanium. I will take my ma titanium which is 40.31 g and I will divide this by the molar mass of titanium, which happens to be 47.87 g per mole. This is going to cancel out my units of grams and result in an answer of 0.8421 moles of titanium rounded to four significant figures in accordance with the values that I'm using for my calculation. So now I can do the same thing with chlorine, right. I'll take my 59.69 g of chlorine and divide this by the molar mass which is 35.45 grams per malt. This cancels out my unit of grams and yields once again rounded to four significant figures, 1.684 moles of chlorine. So now I can go ahead and find the mole ratio and I will calculate the mole ratio by dividing the moles of chlorine by the moles of titanium. This equals 1.684 MS of chlorine divided by 0.8421 malls of titanium. And this simplifies to a ratio of approximately 2/1. This means that the ratio of chlorine to titanium is approximately 2 to 1. This means that the empirical formula and also the molecular formula is T IC L two. So now we can proceed with our reaction. Recall it TC two was described as crystalline which implies that it is a solid. So in this case, our solid is going to react with sodium mero. Now, one of our products as described in the text of the question is going to be titanium metal. But with respect to the other product recall that this is going to be a single replacement reaction because sodium and titanium are both metals. So sodium can essentially replace titanium in forming a chloride compound. So I have titanium metal as well as sodium chloride as a salt. Recall that the charge of sodium is positive one whereas the charge of chloride is negative one. So to balance out their charges and make the compound neutral overall, there is going to be a 1 to 1 ratio. So here we cannot say that this reaction is balanced until we can confirm that there is the same quantity of each element on both sides of the reaction arrow in this case, it is not quite balanced. Because notice how on the left side, there are two atoms of chlorine, whereas on the right side, there is only one. So this means that on the right side of the equation, I have to add a stric meric coefficient of two in front of sodium chloride. This does balance out my chlorine because now I have two on both sides, but now sodium is no longer balanced. Because notice how on the left I have one atom of sodium and on the right, I have two, this means that I have to add a stoichiometry coefficient of two in front of sodium metal on the left side. So that does in fact balance out my sodium atoms and titanium remains balanced because I have one atom of titanium on the left and one on the right. So there you have it. Here is our final answer which is the balanced chemical equation. One mole of TCL two reacts with two moles of sodium metal to produce one mole of titanium metal and two moles of sodium chloride. So with that being said, thank you so very much for watching. And I hope you found this helpful.