Chemical energy

Common card · No. 329056

Chemical energy is the energy of chemical substances that is released when the substances undergo a chemical reaction and transform into other substances. Some examples of storage media of chemical energy include batteries, food, and gasoline (as well as oxygen gas, which is of high chemical energy due to its relatively weak double bond and indispensable for chemical-energy release in gasoline combustion). Breaking and re-making chemical bonds involves energy, which may be either absorbed by or evolved from a chemical system. If reactants with relatively weak electron-pair bonds convert to more strongly bonded products, energy is released. Therefore, relatively weakly bonded and unstable molecules store chemical energy. Energy that can be released or absorbed because of a reaction between chemical substances is equal to the difference between the energy content of the products and the reactants, if the initial and final temperature is the same. This change in energy can be estimated from...

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