I have no clue what this means because I don’t read German, so I hope it has the right information. Propane: Rhododendronbusch, * Beschreibung: Strukturformel Propan * Quelle: Selbst erstellt, ~~~~~ * Zeichner: ~~~ * Lizenzstatus: GNU FDL –~~~~ category:Chemical structures.Propane: By Holger87 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 ( )%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.Puppy:, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, photo by Lorn.Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – 2,4-dimethylpentane: “2,4-Dimethylpentane structure” by Steffen 962 – Own work.The “n” in the term “n-alkane” stands for the word “normal.” To me, this suggests that branched alkanes are hideous freaks, which should make studying them a little more entertaining.Check out the pictures of cyclopentane and cyclohexane below: a “cycloalkane”), the same thing holds true, except that you add a “cyclo” in front of the name of the molecule to indicate that the atoms are in a circle. If you have a molecule where the atoms are in a circle (i.e.In the example I just mentioned, this compound would be called “3,5-dimethyloctane.” If you have more than one substituent of the same type (for example, let’s imagine that the 5-position in the above example contained a methyl group instead of an ethyl group), we’d use a prefix to indicate this.The name of this compound, then, is 5-ethyl-3-methyloctane. Name the compound by indicating the substituents (in alphabetical order) and their positions, followed by the name of the longest chain.As a result, the substituent on the 3-position is a methyl group (1 carbon atom), while the one at the 5-position is an ethyl group (2 carbon atoms). Fortunately, this is pretty easy because we just need to figure out how many carbon atoms are in a row on each of these. Figure out what the substituents should be called.Since 3 and 5 are less than 4 and 6, the top method is correct. In the bottom one, we start on the right, so the substituents are on the 4- and 6- carbons. In the top figure we start numbering at the left of the chain, so the two substituents are on the 3- and 5- carbon atoms. Though alkanes can and do react on their own, it’s usually a pretty good bet that any other functional groups on the molecule will react first.Īlkanes are named according to the structures of the n-alkanes (the ones in which all of the carbon atoms are in a straight chain)¹ The boring alkane part is usually pretty unreactive, so it’s usually the case that we can just focus on the other, more interesting functional groups. Put another way, we usually think of organic compounds as being boring things that have interesting functional groups attached to them. This complete lack of interesting things causes use to treat alkanes as the basis of all organic compounds. Let’s take a look at our friends the alkanes.Īlkanes are organic compounds that contain only carbon and hydrogen atoms singly-bonded to one another. Compounds can contain more than one functional group, which helps to make organic chemistry a lot more interesting and useful. For example, if an organic compound contains the -OH functional group, it’s referred to as an alcohol and we can expect it to behave in certain ways. What’s different about the different types of molecule are the functional groups they contain.Įssentially, you can think of functional groups as being little reactive things that are located somewhere on an organic compound. You’ve probably noticed this because there’s more than one structure written in your chemistry book.
![alkane functional group alkane functional group](https://reader020.fdocuments.in/reader020/slide/20190821/56649e5f5503460f94b58b72/document-13.png)
Not every molecule is the same as every other molecule.