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Chemistry Question about Metal?
So I've been studying how electricity works.
So from what I understand Metals are good entities to hold negative/positive charges, as well as be conductors, because metals have free electrons. This property gives metals the ability to easily lose or accept electrons.
My question is how this works exactly. What does it mean that metals have free electrons, does that mean every atom in a metal entity has extra electrons it wants to get rid of or accept?
So what happens to a metal when it fulfills its goal to not have any free electrons? Does it magically lose or gain back an electron immediately from space? If it doesn't is there any other way to create disbalance in the electron to proton number in metals to again give it a positive or negative charge?
1 Answer
- ?Lv 74 years agoFavourite answer
Non-metal elements are toward the right side of the periodic table. They can bind to as many electrons as they need to fill their valence shell. They either form covalent bonds or become negatively-charged ions. A full valence shell is so stable that it takes a lot of energy to remove one electron.
Metals are towards the left side of the periodic table. When uncharged their valence shell is less than half full, so they can't form enough bonds with other atoms to fill the shell. Thus, they can only become positively-charged ions.
When there are no other elements present to attract the electrons, a chunk of metal is pretty much an ionic compound between the positive ions and loose electrons.
It takes so little energy to remove an electron from a metal atom, that just being at room temperature will do it. So the electrons bounce around within the metal.
Have you ever played Boggle? As long as someone is shaking the tray, the Boggle cubes keep popping out of their slots and bouncing around until they land in another empty hole. That's what heat does to the electrons in a metal.
Now consider what happens when you connect a metal wire to a battery.
The battery pulls electrons out of the metal at one end, and shunts them to the other end of the battery. So now there's a region of metal with too few electrons. The positive charge attracts electrons from further up the wire. Meanwhile at the negative end of the battery, there is an excess of electrons. Their charge pushes the loose electrons in the wire away from this end of the battery. Overall, the net result is movement of electrons around the circuit.
