How to Balance Chemical Equation

[Jothi]

I need help in my assignment to balance a chemical equation. Help me to solve it.

 

 

This is the equation.

 

Hg(OH)2 + H3Po4 = Hg3(Po4)2 + HOH

 

How to balance it?

 

[Thiya]

First balance Hg

 

So,

 

3Hg(OH)2 + H3Po4 = Hg3(Po4)2 + HOH

 

Now, balancing O

3Hg(OH)2 + H3Po4 = Hg3(Po4)2 + 6HOH

 

Oh my god, got stucked.

 

Never mind Use Chemical Equation Balancer

 

It will help you

[Sensei]

Now, balancing O

3Hg(OH)2 + H3Po4 = Hg3(Po4)2 + 6HOH

 

Oh my god, got stucked.

 

Not O, but whole PO₄

On right there is (PO₄)₂

So place 2 in front of H₃PO₄

 

and we're done

3Hg(OH)₂+2H₃PO₄->Hg₃(PO₄)₂+6H₂O

 

ps. Po is Polonium..

Edited March 28, 2015 by Sensei

[whatgraphene]

I know that this was posted a while ago and it was sorted. But I prefer a more mathematical way of balancing the equation, as this is easier to generalise to any equation (and reduces the amount of jumping from the left and right hand side to make sure everything balances out). Essentially what you need to do is make sure that the number of each atom or group of atoms is the same on the right and left hand side.

 

So for all of the components of the original equation you can have an unknown in front of the component (this is what you use as the sociometric coefficient and balance the equation). This means that we can rewrite the equation as:

 

aHg(OH)₂ + bH₃Po₄ -> cHg₃(Po₄)₂ + dH OH

Now you know that the number of Hg atoms has to be the same on the left and right hand side this means that a=3c to make this true. The 3 comes from the fact that Hg₃(Po₄)₂ has three Hg atoms in the molecule.

 

If we do that for all of the groups in the equation (Hg, OH, H, Po₄) then we get the follow equations:

 

Hg: a=3c (1)

OH: 2a=d (2)

H: 3b=d (3)

Po₄: b=2c (4)

 

What you can do now is set one of the values to 1 (in this case c is good to set to 1).

So if c=1:

a = 3 (from (1))

b = 2 (from (4))

d = 6 (from (3) and b=2)

 

Now that we've got all of the stoichiometric coefficients we can put this back into the original equation to get the balanced formula.

3Hg(OH)₂ + 2H₃Po₄ -> 1Hg₃(Po₄)₂ + 6H OH

 

If any of the coefficients are fractions then you need to multiply ALL of the coefficients by the value of the fraction on the bottom.