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Concept
Mole fraction
Summary
In chemistry, the mole fraction or molar fraction (xi or χi) is defined as unit of the amount of a constituent (expressed in moles), ni, divided by the total amount of all constituents in a mixture (also expressed in moles), ntot. This expression is given below:
The sum of all the mole fractions is equal to 1:
The same concept expressed with a denominator of 100 is the mole percent, molar percentage or molar proportion (mol%).
The mole fraction is also called the amount fraction. It is identical to the number fraction, which is defined as the number of molecules of a constituent Ni divided by the total number of all molecules Ntot. The mole fraction is sometimes denoted by the lowercase Greek letter χ (chi) instead of a Roman x. For mixtures of gases, IUPAC recommends the letter y.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States prefers the term amount-of-substance fraction over mole fraction because it does not contain the name of the unit mole.
Whereas mole fraction is a ratio of moles to moles, molar concentration is a quotient of moles to volume.
The mole fraction is one way of expressing the composition of a mixture with a dimensionless quantity; mass fraction (percentage by weight, wt%) and volume fraction (percentage by volume, vol%) are others.
Mole fraction is used very frequently in the construction of phase diagrams. It has a number of advantages:
it is not temperature dependent (as is molar concentration) and does not require knowledge of the densities of the phase(s) involved
a mixture of known mole fraction can be prepared by weighing off the appropriate masses of the constituents
the measure is symmetric: in the mole fractions x = 0.1 and x = 0.9, the roles of 'solvent' and 'solute' are reversed.
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Related concepts (21)
Mole fraction
In chemistry, the mole fraction or molar fraction (xi or χi) is defined as unit of the amount of a constituent (expressed in moles), ni, divided by the total amount of all constituents in a mixture (also expressed in moles), ntot. This expression is given below: The sum of all the mole fractions is equal to 1: The same concept expressed with a denominator of 100 is the mole percent, molar percentage or molar proportion (mol%). The mole fraction is also called the amount fraction.
Solution (chemistry)
In chemistry, a solution is a special type of homogeneous mixture composed of two or more substances. In such a mixture, a solute is a substance dissolved in another substance, known as a solvent. If the attractive forces between the solvent and solute particles are greater than the attractive forces holding the solute particles together, the solvent particles pull the solute particles apart and surround them. These surrounded solute particles then move away from the solid solute and out into the solution.
Molar mass
In chemistry, the molar mass (M) of a chemical compound is defined as the ratio between the mass and the amount of substance (measured in moles) of any sample of said compound. The molar mass is a bulk, not molecular, property of a substance. The molar mass is an average of many instances of the compound, which often vary in mass due to the presence of isotopes. Most commonly, the molar mass is computed from the standard atomic weights and is thus a terrestrial average and a function of the relative abundance of the isotopes of the constituent atoms on Earth.
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