Chemistry

What would cause entropy to decrease in a reaction?

What would cause entropy to decrease in a reaction?

Entropy, as we are all aware, is the quantity of thermal energy per unit of temperature in a system that cannot be used for productive labor. Entropy is a measurement of the system’s molecular disorder or randomness since work is produced by the orderly motion of molecules.

Entropy: Entropy is the measurement of the amount of thermal energy per unit of temperature in a system that cannot be put to productive use. Entropy is a measure of the molecular disorder or unpredictability of a system since work is produced by the orderly motion of molecules. The following are the factors that can alter a reaction’s entropy:-

It rises as the liquid and gaseous states of the reactants, respectively, shift from their solid to liquid states during a reaction.

Additionally, it rises when the relative abundance of gaseous products over reactants is greater.
The following are the circumstances that would lead to a reaction’s entropy decreasing as a result of the aforementioned two considerations:-

When solid products are produced from liquid or gaseous reactants, which is most likely in the case of a precipitation reaction, the entropy of the process might be reduced. This is due to the fact that solids have the lowest entropy because their atoms are organized rather than randomly arranged as they are in a gaseous condition.

If the number of moles of gases created as a product is smaller than the number of moles of gaseous reactant, as is conceivable in combination reactions of gases, the entropy can also be reduced.

Note: Entropy is a state function, which means it is dependent on the system’s state rather than the reaction’s course. For this reason, the following assertions about the state of the product and reactant are taken into account when entropy changes.