Draw an energy diagram for an exothermic reaction.

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Welcome back, everyone. We need to show the energy diagram for an exothermic reaction and label it with energy reaction progression, reactants products. And delta H let's begin by labeling our axis. We have our Y axis which measures the energy of our system being our reaction. And then on our X axis recall that we have our reaction progression. You can also see this labeled as reaction coordinate and it just describes how our reaction proceeds to completion. Now, next, we're going to go back to our prompts and notice that we're told we have an exothermic reaction recall that this describes the fact that our system being our reaction releases heat. So we have heat being released. And we're going to recall that we can measure this amount of heat that is released by utilizing delta H for entropy change. So let's recall that in regards to enthalpy change, delta H, we are able to measure out the heat released in our system by taking the difference between our sum of bond energies of our reactants, which are being, which the bonds are being broken minus the sum of the bond energies of our products where the bonds are being formed for our products. And from this calculation, we can therefore understand that our energy of our products is less than the energy of our reactants. And this corresponds to a negative entropy change signaling an exothermic reaction. So with all of this outlined, let's label our reactants and products. So beginning near our origin and starting at a higher energy, we're going to label our reactants and then at a lower energy, we're going to have our products. On the right hand side of our diagram, now with our reactants and products labeled, we need to connect them with a curve to show our reaction progression. So we're going to draw a curve beginning with our reactants which will increase up all the way to a first peak that we have where we would consider this peak, our transition state, which denotes the point at which our reactants have gained enough energy to be able to form our products. So we can now draw a downward portion of our curve proceeding to completion of our reaction where our products are formed at a lower energy. Next, we're going to want to draw a dotted line from where our reactants lie on our diagram and our products lie. And we're going to draw out a measure between these two dotted lines which is to calculate for entropy change again, the heat or any form of energy change that occurs in our reaction. And in this case, we're focusing on the energy exchange between our reactants and products via our reactants, which have broken bonds and our products which will have new bonds formed. And overall, we would observe a net release of energy due to the fact that we have an exothermic reaction. And so overall, we just want to highlight our labels, our energy, our reaction progression reactants products and entropy change delta H as all of our labels completing our energy diagram as our final answer. So I hope that this made sense and let us know if you have any questions.

Draw an energy diagram for an exothermic reaction.

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Key Concepts

Exothermic Reaction

Energy Diagram

Activation Energy