Chemical and physical properties of Silicon (for my seminar)
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Answer:
Chemical and physical properties of Silicon
Explanation:
What are the chemical properties of silicon?
Silicon. Silicon is the most abundant electropositive element in The Earth's crust. It's a metalloid with a marked metallic luster and very brittle. It is usually tetravalent in its compounds, although sometimes its bivalent, and it's purely electropositive in its chemical behaviour.Lenntech Water treatment & purification
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Silicon - Si
Chemical properties of silicon -
Silicon
Silicon is the most abundant electropositive element in The Earth’s crust. It’s a metalloid with a marked metallic luster and very brittle. It is usually tetravalent in its compounds, although sometimes its bivalent, and it’s purely electropositive in its chemical behaviour. Moreover, pentacoordinated and hexacoordinated silicon compounds are also known.
Natural silicon contains 92.2% of the isotope 28, 4.7% of silicon 29 and 3.1% of silicon 30. Apart from those stable natural isotopes, various radiactive artificial isotopes are known. Elemental silicon has the physical properties of metalloids, similar to the ones or germanium, situated under it in the group IV of the periodic table. Silicon is an intrinsic semiconductor in it’s purest form, although the intensity of its semiconduction is highly increased by introducing small quantities of impurities. Silicon is similar to metals in its chemical behaviour.
It’s almost as electropositive as tin and much more positive than germanium or lead. According to this metallic character, it forms tetrapositive ions and various covalent compounds; it appears as a negative ion only in a few silicides and as a positive constituent of oxyacids or complex anions.
It forms various series of hydrides, various halides (many of which contain silicon-silicon bounds) and many series of compounds which contain oxygen, which can have ionic or covalent properties.
Applications
Silicon is the principal component of glass, cement, ceramics, most semiconductor devices, and silicones, the latter a plastic substance often confused with silicon.
The properties of silica include both chemical and physical properties such as hardness, color, melting and boiling point, and reactivity. Silica under normal conditions of temperature and pressure is a solid, crystallized mineral.
Silica Defined
Silica is another name for the chemical compound silicon dioxide. Each unit of silica includes one atom of silicon and two atoms of oxygen.
If you have never heard of silica before, you might be surprised to hear that you probably come into contact with it every day. Silica makes up the mineral called quartz, and it is the most abundant mineral in the earth's crust. It is the main component of most sand and the primary ingredient in glass. Every time you pick up a glass to take a drink, you are using silica.
Silica has been known to humans since ancient times, long before we knew it was made of silicon and oxygen. The art of making glass objects with silica dates back centuries. Today, there are many industrial uses for silica. These include abrasives, building materials, fillers, electronics, and water filtration.
Properties of Silica
The properties of silica include both chemical and physical properties such as hardness, color, melting and boiling point, and reactivity. Silica under normal conditions of temperature and pressure is a solid, crystallized mineral. It is relatively hard, rating a 7 on the Mohs scale, a scale used to measure the hardness of minerals relative to each other. The hardest mineral, diamond, rates 10 on the scale.
Pure silica is colorless, but if contaminants are present in a sample of quartz, it may be colored. For instance, rose quartz is silica with trace amounts of iron. This gives it a pinkish hue. Milky quartz is simply silica with air bubbles or inclusions of liquid that make the mineral appear white.