Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Carbon compounds
Summary
Carbon compounds are defined as chemical substances containing carbon. More compounds of carbon exist than any other chemical element except for hydrogen. Organic carbon compounds are far more numerous than inorganic carbon compounds. In general bonds of carbon with other elements are covalent bonds. Carbon is tetravalent but carbon free radicals and carbenes occur as short-lived intermediates. Ions of carbon are carbocations and carbanions are also short-lived. An important carbon property is catenation as the ability to form long carbon chains and rings.
Allotropes of carbon
The known inorganic chemistry of the allotropes of carbon (diamond, graphite, and the fullerenes) blossomed with the discovery of buckminsterfullerene in 1985, as additional fullerenes and their various derivatives were discovered. One such class of derivatives is inclusion compounds, in which an ion is enclosed by the all-carbon shell of the fullerene. This inclusion is denoted by the "@"symbol in endohedral fullerenes. For example, an ion consisting of a lithium ion trapped within buckminsterfullerene would be denoted Li+@C60. As with any other ionic compound, this complex ion could in principle pair with a counterion to form a salt. Other elements are also incorporated in so-called graphite intercalation compounds.
Carbides are binary compounds of carbon with an element that is less electronegative than it. The most important are
Al4C3,
B4C,
CaC2,
Fe3C,
HfC,
SiC,
TaC,
TiC, and
WC.
Organic compound
It was once thought that organic compounds could only be created by living organisms. Over time, however, scientists learned how to synthesize organic compounds in the lab. The number of organic compounds is immense and the known number of defined compounds is close to 10 million. However, an indefinitely large number of such compounds is theoretically possible.
By definition, an organic compound must contain at least one atom of carbon, but this criterion is not generally regarded as sufficient.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.