Half Life
Moderators: Chem_Mod, Chem_Admin
-
- Posts: 40
- Joined: Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:04 am
Half Life
Can someone explain what the half life of a reaction is? And why would we be interested in a half life of a reaction?
-
- Posts: 50
- Joined: Sat Jul 22, 2017 3:01 am
Re: Half Life
A half-life reaction indicates how long it takes for the concentration of a reactant to decrease to half of its initial concentration. We would be interested because it is involved in many things, such as radioactive decay, which pertain to chemistry.
-
- Posts: 56
- Joined: Sat Jul 22, 2017 3:00 am
- Been upvoted: 2 times
Re: Half Life
The half-life of a reaction is the time required for a reactant to reach half its original concentration. This information is helpful to predict the concentration of a substance over time. Another application that Dr. Lavelle mentioned in class is that knowing the half-life can help to identify an unknown substance because this characteristic is unique to each substance (at a given order).
-
- Posts: 37
- Joined: Fri Sep 25, 2015 3:00 am
Re: Half Life
Another important and perhaps real life application for the half life would be for pharmacists and doctors that are prescribing drugs, since they need to know how long that drug will stay in your system, which is something the half life of a reaction would be able to tell you.
-
- Posts: 50
- Joined: Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:03 am
Re: Half Life
Half lives can be very useful in determining the approximate age of organic objects via radiometric dating.
-
- Posts: 82
- Joined: Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:07 am
- Been upvoted: 1 time
Re: Half Life
Also for medications. It could be useful to know how long a medicine is going to be active in a patient's body and how much is going to be present.
-
- Posts: 65
- Joined: Fri Sep 29, 2017 7:07 am
- Been upvoted: 1 time
Re: Half Life
Hi Diana! The half life tells you how fast/slow a compound decays. It is important because if you are storing a medicine, you might want to know how much is left after a certain time because if you are injecting medicine into a human you will want to know how much you are injecting and also how long the medicine will take to wear off.
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests