Friday, 10 February 2017

GCSE OCR Gateway C4:1c Transition metal properties

Learning Objective:
To be able to recall the general properties of transition metals and their compounds and exemplify these by reference to a small number of transition metals: melting point, density, reactivity, formation of colored ions with different charges and uses as catalysts.

The transition metals lie between Groups 2 and 3 of the Periodic Table.



The GCSE course expects you’ll be familiar with the first row of transition metals.

That's from Scandium (Sc) to Zinc (Zn).

In that row, the common ones are copper (Cu), iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn).

I’ve put the common properties you need to know in the table below for iron, copper, zinc and nickel.



Transition metals are not as reactive as Group 1 or Group 2 metals.

Many transition metals are quite unreactive with water and with dilute acids such as copper, silver, gold and platinum.

Others react very slowly with water such as iron and zinc.

All transition metals are hard and dense and are often alloyed with iron to make tough and hard steels.

All transition metals have high melting points.

All transition metals have different colored ions in aqueous solution as this poster from Compoundchem.com shows:



Lastly, transition metals and their compounds are used as catalysts in many different chemical processes and just a few are mentioned in the table.

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