alkanes

Reaction Friday: Free-radical chlorination of alkanes

Reaction Friday: Free-radical chlorination of alkanes

January 13, 2012

One of the new things I wanted to do this year was to start doing videos. Since I was starting to run out of reagents to talk about for Reagent Friday, one thought was to start talking about reactions instead – and maybe make a video for each. So today starts a new experiment: Reaction [...]

Tagged as: alkanes, chlorination, Cl2, free radicals, halogenation, Reaction Friday

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Don’t Be Futyl, Learn The Butyls

Don’t Be Futyl, Learn The Butyls

November 10, 2011

Nomenclature: what a headache. We’ve got all these accumulated years of jargon regarding chemical structures, and unless you learn the lingo, it can be confusing to follow what’s going on. Case in point: butyl. There are FOUR different types of “butyls”, and they all have their own name. In addition they each have a common [...]

Tagged as: alkanes, butyl, conventions, isomers, n-butyl, nomenclature, s-butyl, t-butyl

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Reagent Friday: Hydrazine (NH2NH2)

Reagent Friday: Hydrazine (NH2NH2)

September 24, 2011

In a blatant plug for the Reagent Guide and the Reagents App for iPhone, each Friday  I profile a different reagent that is commonly encountered in Org 1/ Org 2.  The first time I ever heard about hydrazine, it was from my instructor for 3rd year advanced organic chemistry, Walt Szarek.  “If ya ever work with this stuff”, he [...]

Tagged as: alkanes, explosives, hydrazine, hydrazone, reagent friday, Reagent guide, reagents app, wolff-kishner

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Condensed Formulas: Deciphering What the Brackets Mean

June 20, 2011

Recall that there are at least 4 major ways of representing molecules that you’re introduced to in the first week of ochem. The highest level of detail is the Lewis dot structure, which shows where all the electrons are with dots. The second highest level of detail is the structural formula, which replaces those dots [...]

Tagged as: alkanes, brackets, condensed formulas, isomers, nomenclature

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The Many, Many Ways of Drawing Butane

October 15, 2010

One of the skills you have to develop early in Org 1 is to learn the different conventions for drawing molecules. Let’s use butane as an example. Butane is pretty boring molecule, frankly. It’s four carbons in a row. Not much more to it than that. However, even a simple molecule like butane can be [...]

Tagged as: abbreviations, alkanes, bond rotations, conformations, dashes, drawing, hidden hydrogens, newman projections, nomenclature, wedges

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Useful Online Resources for Nomenclature Help

July 7, 2010

My least favorite subject, to be honest. I haven’t covered nomenclature in detail but I still get a lot of questions about it. So instead of writing about it, I thought I would point out all the hard work other people have done to make this a more understandable and palatable subject. Textbooks “Organic Nomenclature“, [...]

Tagged as: alkanes, links, nomenclature, problems, resources, study tips, tutorials

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