in this video i'm going to give you a brief introduction into sigma and pi bonds so what you need to know is that a single bond is a sigma bond a double bond contains one sigma and one pi bond a triple bond contains one sigma and two pi bonds so i'm going to use ethene as an example the lewis structure of ethene looks like this so every single bond that we see here is a sigma bond and sigma bonds are formed from the overlap of atomic orbitals the carbon is sp2 hybridized and hydrogen is it has an s hybridization so therefore once we mix the s orbital with the sp2 orbital that produces a sigma bond so this is another sigma bond so this one is formed from the overlap of two sp2 hybrid orbitals so as you can see this molecule has five sigma bonds one two three four five now the pi bond arises due to the unhybridized p orbitals that exist above and below the single bond so this forms the pi bond and the sigma bond is in the middle so now you can visually see how a sigma bond and a pi bond how they look alike and how they differ so all of these are sigma bonds so in this molecule we have five sigma bonds and one pi bond so let's work on some problems so i'm going to give you a molecule c2h2 also known as acetylene and what i want you to do is i want you to draw the lewis structure and determine the number of sigma and pi bonds that can be found in this molecule so feel free to pause the video and give this problem a shot go ahead and try it acetylene can be drawn this way it's important to know that hydrogen likes to form one bond and carbon likes to form four bonds so first you want to draw the molecule with symmetry now in order for carbon to have four bonds we need to put a triple bond in the middle this is the lewis structure of acetylene it's a linear molecule now how many sigma and pi bonds are present in this molecule now keep in mind every bond contains one sigma bond so it's one two three there are three single bonds in this molecule now a triple bond has two pi bonds so we have three sigma and two pi bonds that's all you got to do here's another example that you could try draw the lewis structure of this molecule and determine the number of sigma and pi bonds that are present in it so carbon has to be the center atom because they can form the most number of bonds four bonds hydrogen can only form a single bond and oxygen likes to form two bonds so with that knowledge we know that this has to be the structure so we can see that we have one two three sigma bonds and we have a double bond which contains one pi bond so that's the number of sigma and pi bonds found in ch2o also known as formaldehyde now let's try another example so2cl2 how can we draw the lewis structure of this molecule sulfur can form up to six bonds it has six valence electrons and if it gives away all six it could form six bonds to do so oxygen likes to form two bonds and chlorine likes to form one bond so having that knowledge we could assemble this structure like this so that's so2cl2 now how many sigma bonds and pi bonds do you see in this molecule so every bond has at least one sigma bond so one two three four there's four single bonds and each double bond contains one pi bond so we have a total of two pi bonds and it's basically counted that's all you need to do in order to determine the number of sigma and pi bonds so i'm going to give you a more complicated structure determine the number of sigma and pi bonds in this compound so all you got to do is just count the number of bonds to get the sigma bonds one two 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11. so there are 11 sigma bonds the triple bond has two pi bonds the double bond has one so we have a total of three pi bonds you