HomeWHICHWhich Of The Following Properties Do Solids Share With Liquids

Which Of The Following Properties Do Solids Share With Liquids

Water gushes out of the faucet. Honey oozes out of a squeeze bottle. Gasoline flows out of the pump. These are just three examples of a highly diverse state of matter: liquids. One of the key defining properties of liquids is their ability to flow. Beyond this feature, though, the behaviors of different liquids span a broad range. Some liquids flow relatively easily, like water or oil, while others, like honey or molasses, flow quite slowly. Some are slippery, and some are sticky. Where do these different behaviors come from?

When it comes to interactions between different liquids, some mix well: Think of a Shirley Temple, made of ginger ale and grenadine. Others, though, don’t seem to mix at all. Consider oil spills, where the oil floats in a sticky, iridescent layer on top of the water. You may also notice a similar phenomenon in some salad dressings that separate into an oil layer that rests atop a layer of vinegar, which is primarily water. Why don’t these liquids mix well?

These varied behaviors arise primarily from the different types of intermolecular forces that are present in liquids. In this module we’ll first discuss liquids in the context of the other two main states of matter, solids and gases. Then we will go through a brief overview of intermolecular forces, and finally we’ll explore how intermolecular forces govern the way that liquids behave.

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Liquids flow because the intermolecular forces between molecules are weak enough to allow the molecules to move around relative to one another. Intermolecular forces are the forces between neighboring molecules. (These are not to be confused with intramolecular forces, such as covalent and ionic bonds, which are the forces exerted within individual molecules to keep the atoms together.) The forces are attractive when a negative charge interacts with a nearby positive charge and repulsive when the neighboring charges are the same, either both positive or both negative. In liquids, the intermolecular forces can shift between molecules and allow them to move past one another and flow. (See Figure 1 for an illustration of the various intermolecular forces and interactions.)

Contrast that with a solid, in which the intermolecular forces are so strong that they allow very little movement. While molecules may vibrate in a solid, they are essentially locked into a rigid structure, as described in the Properties of Solids module. At the other end of the spectrum are gases, in which the molecules are so far apart that the intermolecular forces are effectively nonexistent and the molecules are completely free to move and flow independently.

At a molecular level, liquids have some properties of gases and some of solids. First, liquids share the ability to flow with gases. Both liquid and gas phases are fluid, meaning that the intermolecular forces allow the molecules to move around. In both of these phases, the materials don’t have fixed shapes and instead are shaped by the containers holding them.

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Solids are not fluid, but liquids share a different important property with them. Liquids and solids are both held together by strong intermolecular forces and are much more dense than gases, leading to their description as “condensed matter” phases because they are both relatively incompressible. (Figure 2 shows the differences of gases, liquids, and solids at the atomic level.)

Most substances can move between the solid, liquid, and gas phases when the temperature is changed. Consider the molecule H20: It takes the form of ice, a crystalline solid, below 0° C; water, a liquid, between 0° and 100° C; and water vapor, or steam, a gas, above 100° C. These transitions occur because temperature affects the intermolecular attraction between molecules. When H20 is converted from a liquid to gas, for instance, the rising temperature makes the molecules’ kinetic energy increase such that it eventually overcomes the intermolecular forces and the molecules are able to move freely about in the gas phase. However, the intramolecular forces that hold the H20 molecule together are unchanged; H20 is still H20, regardless of its state of matter. You can read more about phase transitions in the States of Matter module.

Now that we’ve discussed how liquids are similar to and different from solids and gases, we can focus on the wide world of liquids. First, though, we need to briefly introduce the different types of intermolecular forces that dictate how liquids, and other states of matter, behave.

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