IGCSE Coordinated Science: Noble Gases

IGCSE Coordinated Science: Noble Gases

Noble Gases

Describe the noble gases as being unreactive.

Before we can answer this question, we must consider the question, “What makes an element reactive?”

Take an element like sodium for example. Sodium is a very reactive element, and as we learned before, this is due to its electronic configuration (obviously, we’re going to ignore reactivity in the same group, but rather in different periods E.g. Sodium vs Argon and not sodium vs Caesium).

Sodium has one outer electron, but secretly, elements don’t want ANY outer electrons (just like I want to get out of the closet) . Sodium has one outer electron, so it will do literally anything it can to lose it. For example, sodium will react with water to produce sodium hydroxide and hydrogen. On the other end of the spectrum, an element like chlorine wants to gain one electron, hence making it quite reactive to certain substances as well.

However, as we can see in the below diagram, an element like Argon (group 8 element) already has 8 outer electrons. Why does it need to lose or gain anymore electrons? (That was a rhetorical question, but I think you get the point).

Therefore, we can summarize a noble gases un-reactive attributes due to the lack of incentive to either lose or gain electrons because of its full shell electron configuration

Describe the uses of the noble gases in providing an inert atmosphere, i.e. argon in lamps, helium for filling balloon.

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Noble gases might be unreactive, but they’re certainly not useless – In fact, noble gases are instrumental when building many things, e.g.:

Argon:

• Due to its lack of reactivity, argon is most prominently used in lighting, e.g. for light bulbs.

Helium

• Improve breathing in asthma sufferers.
• Filling balloons

Xenon

• Sometimes used as an anesthetic because of its high solubility in lipids.

Krypton

• This is often used in high performance light bulbs.