4.1 Writing and balancing chemical equations  (Page 4/14)

This balanced equation, derived in the usual fashion, is called a molecular equation    because it doesn’t explicitly represent the ionic species that are present in solution. When ionic compounds dissolve in water, they may dissociate into their constituent ions, which are subsequently dispersed homogenously throughout the resulting solution (a thorough discussion of this important process is provided in the chapter on solutions). Ionic compounds dissolved in water are, therefore, more realistically represented as dissociated ions, in this case:

Unlike these three ionic compounds, AgCl does not dissolve in water to a significant extent, as signified by its physical state notation, s .

Explicitly representing all dissolved ions results in a complete ionic equation    . In this particular case, the formulas for the dissolved ionic compounds are replaced by formulas for their dissociated ions:

Examining this equation shows that two chemical species are present in identical form on both sides of the arrow, Ca ²⁺ ( aq ) and ${\text{NO}}_3{}^{\text{−}}(aq).$ These spectator ions —ions whose presence is required to maintain charge neutrality—are neither chemically nor physically changed by the process, and so they may be eliminated from the equation to yield a more succinct representation called a net ionic equation    :

Following the convention of using the smallest possible integers as coefficients, this equation is then written:

This net ionic equation indicates that solid silver chloride may be produced from dissolved chloride and silver(I) ions, regardless of the source of these ions. These molecular and complete ionic equations provide additional information, namely, the ionic compounds used as sources of Cl ⁻ and Ag ⁺ .