For this next tutorial, we are going
to discuss how to build a molecular model.
This is your basic molecular model kit.
And if you open it up, it will come with an instruction
booklet that will give you just basic instructions on how
to build a model and what pieces represent what.
Now the first model that we are going to build
is going to be ethane which, as we all know,
is a basic two carbon hydrocarbon.
And each of these pieces basically represent carbons.
So in order to build a simple tetrahedral carbon,
we're going to combine them just by snapping them together
like this.
So that makes a single tetrahedral carbon.
And we're going to do that again with these two pieces.
There you go.
And then to make ethane, we just simply snap them together.
Now as you can see, with a single bond,
these carbons will rotate freely about that bond.
And that is ethane.
Now, in order to build propane, we
would simply take another tetrahedral carbon, which
I've already assembled, and just snap it onto the already
assembled ethane.
And now we have our basic propane.
And we can see here that it rotates freely again
and we can rotate it like this.
You just see the free rotation about the single bonds.
Now, we want to build a much larger molecule.
So I'm going to build a decane.
Now, I have some pre-assembled carbons here.
And in order to build this molecule, again,
just like we did before, I'm just
going to snap these together real quick.
And as you can see, the more I put on,
the more ways I can move this around.
It's not always just your simple structure,
like in your bond line formula.
You can do it sort of any way you can come up with.
You can even make a ring structure out of it,
if you want to.
So just play around with this as you
do it and you'll see all the possible ways that you
can build a molecule.
All right.
And there is our decane.
And then we can see also that, again, I mean,
there's a lot of ways that you can just play around with this.
Make a ring structure here.
And you can even put these together like this
and you can get two ring structures like this,
make a bicyclic compound.
And then the last thing we want to do
is discuss how to put a double bond into here.
So we're going to make this into decene.
In order to make this into decene,
we're going to add a double bond, which looks like this.
Now, for this example, we'll make it 4-decene,
which means that I'm going to break the fourth bond right
here.
And we'll pull these off because,
by adding a double bond, these are no longer
tetrahedral carbons.
And we're going to just snap this in here, just like that.
And now you have decene.
And you can still rotate it, as you can see.
But this bond right here does not
rotate as the single bonds do, which
we know double bonds do not rotate freely.
So there's your basic decene.