Fluorine is more electronegative than chlorine, yet fluoromethane...

Question

Fluorine is more electronegative than chlorine, yet fluoromethane
1CH3F; m = 1.86 D2 has a smaller dipole moment
than chloromethane 1CH3Cl; m = 1.90 D2. Explain.

Accepted Answer

Hello everyone today. We are being given the following problem which of the following statement explains why nitrogen try fluoride has a smaller dyp home moment than nitrogen tri chloride. Even though flooring is more electro negative than chlorine. Well, the first thing you must do is you must draw out our structures for both of these compounds. So for our nitrogen try fluoride, we have a single nitrogen That is bonded to three different florins and at the same time Each flooring has six electrons surrounding them to account for the octet rule. So we have our nitrogen try Floyd here and for our nitrogen try chloride we are going to have our nitrogen surrounded by three different chlorine atoms and each quarry item is going to have six electrons surrounding them With two on the nitrogen. And this is going to essentially count for the octet rule as well. And so chlorine and flooring are both more electoral negative than nitrogen. So we are going to draw our di pole moments in the direction of our halogen. Next we're going to account for their geometry and they are both going to be tribunal pyramidal geometry and they have the same direction of diet paul moments. So we said that these are both these religions are both more electro negative than nitrogen. However, flooring is more electro negative then chlorine due to its location on the periodic table. And so the trend is the From you go down two up and left to right is an increase in your electro negativity. And so while flooring is more electro negative than chlorine chlorine is larger than flooring. And so we can say that chlorine is larger then flooring, so we can say confidently that the nitrogen chlorine bond is going to be longer than that of the nitrogen flooring bond. With that information, we can determine that the separation of charge is larger in our nitrogen tetra chloride, then that inner nitrogen tetra fluoride, and so that leads us with answer choice C. The separation of charge and nitrogen tri chloride is larger than nitrogen. Try fluoride, giving it a larger dipole moment. And with that we've answered our question overall, I hope that this helped until next time.

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