Transition Metals

Hey guys. In this video we're going to take a look at some of the common types of properties dealing with transition metals. So, here we're going to say like most main group elements, transition metals possess similar physical properties. So, some of the physical properties that they share are common to many types of metals, for instance their luster or shine metals in general tend to be shiny, they also have high densities, we're going to say here they're good at electrical and thermal conductivity, we're also going to say they possess high melting points and also hardness. Now, when it comes to conduction there are some metals that work better than others, for instance, we're going to say that silver or AG, possesses the greatest electrical conductivity. So, silver is usually a great way of basically transferring electrons from point A to point B, we're also want to say coming in second would be copper. Now, when it comes to melting point, we're going to say that tungsten or W possesses the highest melting at 3400 degrees Celsius. Now, you'll learn that, well, you probably know from common knowledge that old light bulbs used to have a tungsten filament in them before we move on to more efficient means of using light bulbs, we're also going to say Tungsten's were also used as huge, huge containers for melting of like hot iron or within old school factories, you may actually, if you are in certain towns, you may still see huge furnaces, huge containers made of tungsten, we're going to say that while blank is the only metal that is a liquid at room temperature. So, we say that this is mercury. Now, on the hardness scale, we're going to say here that iron and titanium are strong or hard metals, meaning it would take incredibly high temperatures and a long amount of time for us to be able to melt them. Now, we're going to say here that copper, silver and gold are considered to be soft metals, which makes sense, if you think about it in history coins were usually made up of what, copper, silver and gold, they're malleable easier to melt and fashioned into different types of coins with different types of images on them, that's why a lot of money back in the ancient times was made up of these different types of metals, these soft metals. Now, oxidation states, we're going to say, remember that transition metals possess variable on charges, certain transition metals can have multiple charges, remember, we refer to them as type 2 metals, type 2 metals just means they have more than one charge, manganese for instance has many different charges so it's a type 2 metal, but there are some transition metals that possess only one charge. Remember, that zinc is always plus 2, cadmium is always plus 2, silver is always plus 1, if they don't have variable charges, they only have one charge. So, we refer to them as type 1 metals, type 1 metals have only one charge, type 2 metals have more than one charge. So, transition metals possess variable charges and so the use of what we call reducing agents, reducing agents have to be used in order to identify which particular charge we're dealing with, these reducing agents donate electrons and based on the number of electrons of the metal ion accepts we're able to determine the oxidation state of that transition metal, those of you who are lucky enough to decide to go into organic chemistry, you'll learn more and more about the different types of reducing agents that are used every day with inorganic systems.

Alright guys, so hopefully guys pause the video and you attempted to do this question. So, what we want to do here is we want to do manganese neutral. So, manganese neutral, look at your periodic table would be argon, right? It'd be 4s2 3d5. So, that's what you should got for it when it was neutral. Now, 4 plus means are losing 4 electrons. Remember, you always lose your electrons from the outer shell, the outer shell is one with the larger end value. So, here these electrons, these two electrons are in the fourth shell, these 5 electrons are in the third shell, we're going to lose them from the fourth shell first, so we lose two from 4s. So, they'll be gone but we have to lose two more from 3d, losing two more would give us at the end argon 3d3, so this is the answer you should have gotten for manganese 4 plus ion. Now, that you've seen that example try to do the last example on your own, come back and see how I approach that question.

Alright guys. So, let's try to do this one, let's do the neutral form of iron first. So, iron when it's neutral it is argon 4s2 3d6, 6 positive means we lose 6 electrons. So, we're going to have left is argon, you lose the first two from the 4s, meaning we have to lose four more. So, we take them from the 3d. So, doing that give us 3d2. So, 3d2 would be your answer here. So, this would be argon 3d2, hopefully you're able to do all these electron configurations. Remember, the exception that we talked about mainly is for first row transition metals, we don't tend to see that the further down we go in terms of those two columns within the transition metal pit, remembering these key exceptions is key to getting the correct answer at the end.