What are some common mistakes students make with Hydrogen bonds?
1 Answer
The most common mistake I see with hydrogen bonding is the misunderstanding of the relative strengths of the intermolecular forces.
Most people mistake hydrogen bonding for the strongest intermolecular bond, when hydrogen bonding is just the strongest form of dipole-dipole attraction.
The two strongest types of intermolecular bonds are the ion-induced dipole and the ion-dipole attractions. They are the strongest essentially because the ion's charge doesn't just turn off like the instantaneous dipoles.
The second most common mistake I see with hydrogen bonding is that, in organic chemistry, people tend to forget that the polar carbonyl group can participate in hydrogen bonding.
