Meaning of empirical formula, molecular formula, structural formula and contracted formula

In chemistry, the empirical formula of a chemical compound is the simplest whole number ratio ofatoms of each element present in a compound.[1] An empirical formula makes no reference toisomerism, structure, or absolute number of atoms. The empirical formula is used as standard for most ionic compounds, such as CaCl2, and for macromolecules, such as SiO2. The term empirical refers to the process of elemental analysis, a technique of analytical chemistry used to determine the relative amounts of each element in a chemical compound.

In contrast, the molecular formula identifies the number of each type of atom in a molecule, and thestructural formula also shows the structure of the molecule.

For example, the chemical compound n-hexane has the structural formula CH3CH2CH2CH2CH2CH3, which shows that it has 6 carbon atoms arranged in a straight chain, and 14 hydrogen atoms. Hexane's molecular formula is C6H14, and its empirical formula is C3H7, showing a C:H ratio of 3:7. Different compounds can have the same empirical formula. For example, formaldehyde, acetic acid and glucosehave the same empirical formula, CH2O. This is the actual chemical formula for formaldehyde, but acetic acid has double the number of atoms and glucose has six times the number of atoms.

A chemical formula or molecular formula is a way of expressing information about the atoms that constitute a particular chemical compound.

The chemical formula identifies each constituent element by its chemical symboland indicates the number of atoms of each element found in each discretemolecule of that compound. If a molecule contains more than one atom of a particular element, this quantity is indicated using a subscript after the chemical symbol (although 18th-century books often used superscripts) and also can be combined by more chemical elements.

Chemical formulas may be used in chemical equations to describe chemical reactions.
For
ionic compounds and other non-molecular substances an empirical formula may be used, in which the subscripts indicate the ratio of the elements.

The 19th-century Swedish chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius worked out this system for writing chemical formulas.

The structural formula of a chemical compound is a graphical representation of the molecular structure, showing how the atoms are arranged. The chemical bonding within the molecule is also shown, either explicitly or implicitly. There are three common representations used in publications: text, Lewis typeand line-angle formula. Also several other formats are used, as in chemical databases, such as SMILES,InChI and CML.

Unlike chemical formulae or chemical names, structural formulas provide a representation of the molecular structure. Chemists nearly always describe a chemical reaction or synthesis using structural formulae rather than chemical names, because the structural formulas allow the chemist to visualize the molecules and the changes that occur.

Many chemical compounds exist in different isomeric forms, which have different structures but the same overall chemical formula. A structural formula indicates the arrangements of atoms in a way that a chemical formula cannot.

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