Naphthalene is a hydrocarbon used in mothballs, in a combustion analysis it produced 8.80 g of co2 and 1.44 g of water. calculate the empirical formula.

C5H4 Calculate how many moles of hydrogen and carbon you have in the products. Do this by lookup up the atomic weights of each element in the products Carbon = 12.0107 Hydrogen = 1.00794 Oxygen = 15.999 Using those atomic weights, calculate the molar mass of each product CO2 = 12.0107 + 2 * 15.999 = 44.0087 H2O = 2 * 1.00794 + 15.999 = 18.01488 Now figure out how many moles of each product was produced. CO2: 8.80 g / 44.0087 g/mol = 0.19996 mol H2O: 1.44 g / 18.01488 g/mol = 0.079934 mol Moles of carbon = 0.19996, moles of hydrogen = 2 * 0.079934 = 0.159868 Now we need to find a ratio of small integers that closely approximates 0.19996 / 0.159868 = 1.250782 The closest ratio is 5/4 which indicates that for every 5 carbon atoms, there are 4 hydrogen atoms, so the empirical formula is C5H4.

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