freezing point depression- type pad（凝固点降低,垫类型）.doc

Freezing Point Depression The Determination of Molar Mass via Colligative Properties Introduction When molecules come together to form a solid the process is called crystallization, freezing or solidification. The reverse of this process is referred to as melting (fusion). A liquid containing an impurity freezes at a different temperature than the pure liquid. This phenomenon is largely driven by entropy, also described as the measure of disorder in a system. The more disorder in a system, the lower its energy and the more stable the system. Just think about your room and the energy required to mess it up compared to the energy required to organize it. A liquid solution containing a solvent with an impurity is more disordered than a pure solvent. When a solution freezes, the solvent and the impurity solidify separately, creating a relatively ordered state. Therefore more energy must be removed to take the solution from its highly disordered liquid state to its ordered solid state than to do the same for a pure solvent. Hence, solutions of solvents with impurities freeze at a lower temperature than pure solvents. Looking at the system from the opposite direction, since the liquid solution is more disordered than the liquid pure solvent, it requires less energy to force the solid solution into its disordered liquid state than to take the pure solid to its liquid state, and thus the solution melts at a lower temperature than the pure solvent. Freezing point and melting point are numerically equivalent. The phenomenon of a lower freezing point for solutions compared to pure solvents is referred to as freezing point depression. The magnitude of the reduction in the freezing point is proportional to the quantity of impurity present and can be expressed by Equation 1. Δ T = Kf ? m ? (i) Eq. 1 where ΔT is the change in temperature between the freezing point (TFP) of the pure solvent and the freezing point of the solvent in so