Pages

Friday, June 12, 2015

Organic Chemistry, Form, Part 15 - Ketones, An Introduction

Greetings,

Another important class of organic compounds are the ketones.  Ketones are very similar to aldehydes: the only difference is that the "double-bond oxygen group" is never on the end carbon atom (otherwise you'd have an aldehyde).  Perhaps, the most common ketone is acetone; often used for cleaning and stripping solvents.

A ketone can be produced from a 2-degree alcohol (-OH group bonded to a carbon in turn bonded to two other carbon atoms).  We say the 2-degree alcohol is "oxidized" because hydrogen atoms are lost in the process.  More specifically, we call the process, dehydrogenation.  The following drawing shows the formation of 2-butanone from 2-butanol.


The red and blue dots are meant to indicate electrons which are lost along with a pair of hydrogen atoms.  The two hydrogen atoms, naturally, come together to form diatomic hydrogen gas.  The names provided for the alcohol and ketone are "systematic", but not official IUPAC.  Those names are buta-2-ol and buta-2-one.  IUPAC names are designed for easy determination of compound structures from the their names, but would be cumbersome to speak of in the lab, so chemists use names like those in the diagram.

That's all for now.  As always, thank you for reading!


A Publication of http://ExcellenceInLearning.biz

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments or Questions? Feedback is always welcome!