Transcript for:
Understanding Ionic Bonds and Ions

Hello chemists welcome back to our chapter  2 lecture series Michele Glass here and our   topic for this presentation is the ionic bond. So  we left off in our last video talking about how   to determine the chemical behavior of an atom.  And what you do is you look at that valence   shell or that outermost electron shell.  Remember if your atom has an incomplete,   has unpaired valence electrons, then we would  consider it reactive meaning it can enter into   chemical bond. And that could be an ionic bond  which is the topic for this presentation or that   could be a covalent bond which we'll talk about  in the next video. When we talk about an ionic   bond it's important for us to define what we mean  by ions. So ions are going to be charged atoms.   So what we drew in our first video when we  talked about our different atom structure is   we talked about uncharged atoms. So now we're  going to be drawing ions. So ions can be either cations or they can be anions. A cation  is going to have a positive charge the only way to become positively  charged is to lose an electron. If you want to you can think about your  plus sign here the t as a plus sign. So you can make it into a plus sign. An anion is going to have a negative charge which means it's going to gain electrons.   And so what we're seeing is in the formation  of ions you're going to see an atom will lose   an electron or gain an electron. Remember that is  going to be the only subatomic particle that would   be involved here. You can't gain or lose protons  because that actually defines that particular   element. When we talk about an ionic bond we  can use the memory device transfer electrons   because what we see happening is one atom in the  bond is going to gain electrons and the other atom   in the bond will lose electrons. And then the key  thing that we see happening here is that opposite charges attract. And so we're going to see that the anion   and the negative...the cation and the  negative anion they are in love, right?   So they are attracted to each other. So this  is going to be a key feature of the ionic bond. To help yourself remember that your cation   he's losing an electron here's this little comic  strip from Frank and Ernest to help you with that. Okay so let's go ahead and use sodium and chlorine  as our examples. We've drawn out sodium before.   It has atomic number of 11 and so we're going  to do 11 protons in the nucleus, 11 neutrons,   and then we're going to  draw 11 electrons orbiting. Remember two electrons go in the first shell,  eight go in the second, and then because we just   have one electron left we have just one electron  here in the valence shell or outermost shell.   And let's do the same thing here for our chlorine.  So we can see here that chlorine's atomic number   is 17, so 17 protons, 17 neutrons, and  then let's fill in our electron shells. Remember to draw them first  unpaired and go back in and pair. And when you get your chlorine drawing complete notice that you have unpaired electrons in the valence shell. So  when we have unpaired valence electrons or an   incomplete valence shell then we have reactive  atoms. And reactive atoms are going to do some   kind of chemical bond in order to complete that  outermost shell. What happens in an ionic bond   is one atom will lose an electron and the  other atom will gain an electron. So that   electron that used to belong to sodium now belongs  to chlorine. And then your sodium is now called   a cation notice that it has more positive protons  compared to the number of electrons. There are 11   positive protons and just 10 negative electrons  so we're going to assign a positive charge to   sodium. And over here when we look at chlorine  we are seeing an anion it has gained an electron.   So in this case this atom has 17 positive protons  and 18 negative electrons so because it has more   electrons compared to the number of protons it  is called an anion and it has a negative charge.   If we get back up here to our descriptions of  cations and anions we can add here that your anion   will typically be assigned an "-ide" ending. So  when we go back and we look at this compound here   we can write sodium chloride like this (Na+Cl-).  So ionic bonds you're always going to see   the charges. These are fully charged atoms.  We write the anion excuse me the cation first   and then the anion second and we give it an  "-ide" ending so chlorine becomes called chloride. Now what is it that's actually holding the sodium  and the chloride together? That is actually just   this attraction between charges. So we see  that opposite charges attract in chemistry   and here's a funny little comic to help us  remember. It says "Perhaps one of you gentlemen   would mind telling me just what it is outside  the window that you all find so attractive?"   Right? And notice that you've got cations in  the classroom and anions outside. That's it   for ionic bonds. Stay tuned for covalent and as  always take care of yourselves and each other.