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Ionic and Covalent Bonding Essay

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Ionic and Covalent Bonding

Ionic and covalent bonding is involved when the atoms of an element chemically combine to make their outer shells full and to make the atoms stable.

The first type of bonding you can get is ionic bonding. Electrons are transferred from one atom to another to try and create full outer shells, this gain and loss of electrons on the atoms results in positive and negative ions. In these compounds you get electrostatic force, this is the force/attraction that occurs between the positive and negative ions that hold the compound together. This type of bonding takes place between metals and non-metals. The metals lose electrons and form cations, whereas the non-metals gain …show more content…

As the size of the negative ion and the charge on the positive ion both increase and the size of the positive ions decrease, the polarisation effect increases. This polar ionic bonding gives many of the atoms covalent characters. Sometimes one of the atoms become so highly polarised that they share the electrons and therefore can create covalent bonds.

Covalent bonding takes place where two atoms have a single, unpaired electron in an atomic orbital; these orbitals will therefore overlap so that the two atoms are sharing a pair of electrons. The attraction that holds the atoms together is the force between the electron and the nuclei in each of the atoms. Before the atoms are bonded, the single, non-bonded pairs of electrons are called lone pairs of electrons. When the atoms combine by means of covalent bonding they form molecules.

Simple covalent compounds consist of many small molecules. The covalent bonds within the molecules are strong but the bondings between them to form the compounds are relatively weak, the force that occurs between them is called the intermolecular force. It takes very little energy to break these forces; therefore simple covalent compounds have very low melting points and generally appear as gases.

You can also get multiple bonds; this is where atoms can share more than 2

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