Importance Of Stoichiometry

Stoichiometry is a chemical branch that studies amounts of substances that are involved in reactions. Stoichiometry will help you to find out how much of the mixture you will need, or how much you started with. The calculations of a stoichiometry problem depends on a balanced chemical equations. The factors of the balanced equations signifies the molar ratio (the number of moles of each reactant needed to form a certain numbers of moles of each product) of the reactants and products taking part in the reaction. From the atomic and molecular point of view the stoichiometry in a chemical reaction is very simple. For example, one mole of oxygen reacts with two moles of hydrogen,

2 H2 + O2 -> 2 H2O

Or one mole of hydrogen reacts with half a mole of oxygen,

H2 + ½ O2 -> H2O.

Stoichiometry is very used in our daily life, for example cooking. Just imagine that you really want cookies, but you are almost out of sugar, this is where stoichiometry pops in, you have to figure out how much of the other ingredients you will need compared to the amount of sugar that you have.

Besides the stoichiometry use in our daily life we also use it in serious life aspects. Let’s just take the example of airbags.

The journey from that idea and the airbags that we have now has been very long. Today, airbags are a necessary in every car and are designed to act as an extra safety device aside of seat belts. But a lot of people are looking quite sceptical at the air bag safety, because there was a lot of accidents where the airbag didn’t react or it did react, but it didn’t help but killed the driver or the passenger. Since 1991 there was 238 counted just because of air