INTRODUCING ALKANES AND CYCLOALKANES

This is an introductory page about alkanes such as methane, ethane, propane, butane and the rest. It deals with their formulae and isomerism, their physical properties, and an introduction to their chemical reactivity.

What are alkanes and cycloalkanes?

Alkanes

Formulae

Alkanes are the simplest family of hydrocarbons - compounds containing carbon and hydrogen only. They only contain carbon-hydrogen bonds and carbon-carbon single bonds. The first six are:

methane CH4
ethane C2H6
propane C3H8
butane C4H10
pentane C5H12
hexane C6H14

You can work out the formula of any of them using: CnH2n+2

Isomerism

All the alkanes with 4 or more carbon atoms in them show structural isomerism. This means that there are two or more different structural formulae that you can draw for each molecular formula.

For example, C4H10 could be either of these two different molecules:

These are called respectively butane and......

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Title: Chem
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