Can elements decompose into compounds

Answer 1

Think what a chemical compound is:

It is made of molecules. Generally the molecules stick together (or else your compound is likely to be a gas ).

What is a molecule? It is made of a number of atoms that stick together in a certain way. We call the way that the atoms in molecules stick together the molecular bonds. There are different kinds of molecular bonds and some are stronger than others that can easily be broken, for example by shaking them very hard. The bonds that make molecules stick to each other so that they don't fall apart are generally weaker than the molecular bonds. We speak of them as intermolecular forces. Although the intermolecular forces generally are weaker than the molecular bonds, some kinds of large molecules, like proteins and cellulose have so many intermolecular forces that they can add up to being stronger than the molecular bonds.

If you find this confusing, think of a ball of thread; you can wind thread off a reel very easily, far more easily than you can break the thread. However, if you tangle the thread and just tried to pull the tangle apart again then the thread will form knots and break; all the little places where the threads meet they add their forces together till they are stronger than the molecular bonds within the thread. If you first chop up your thread into a very short pieces, say a centimetre or two, then each piece has fewer places that can join up with other pieces of thread, and a mass of such little pieces of thread will not tangle. You can simply blow them apart and none of them will break. In fact it is very difficult to break such short pieces of thread at all because it is hard to get a good grip on them and shaking does them no harm.

What happens when you heat something up? The heat energy makes the molecules shake, and the hotter you make it the harder and faster they shake. If you shake them hard enough you can shake the molecules apart so that they do not stick together very well. That is what turns them into a liquid; we say that they melt.

If you make them still hotter so that they shake still faster, they shake apart altogether. Molecules that shake apart form a gas; we say that they evaporate or boil.

If you heat the molecules still further, they are likely to shake to pieces altogether; we say that the heat has decomposed them.

Now, small, simple molecules made of only two or three atoms held together by strong molecular bonds do not shake to pieces easily. They have to be made very hot indeed before heat can decompose them. Often such molecules do not even stick together very strongly at all if they have weak intermolecular forces. Long before such molecules decompose, they will shake apart and melt or even evaporate.

Examples of such molecules are water and the nitrogen and oxygen in the air you breathe. To break down such molecules by heating them you have to heat them enormously hot.

If you like you can think of such molecules as being like those short pieces of thread.

If you have larger molecules of a medium size, say molecules of sugar, and you heat them very gently, it is possible to melt them without breaking them much. That is how people can make some kinds of candy. If on the other hand, you heat the sugar too suddenly or too hot then some of the molecular bonds will start to break and your candy first will caramelise, turning yellow and then brown, and then it will char, turning black.

Again, if you have a lot of sugar molecules joined into chains, such as starches and cellulose, those are like the long tangled threads that one cannot simply pull apart. If you heat them enough to melt them, then long before they can do anything like melting, they start to char.

If you heat them enough in air, then their shaking bumps them into the oxygen molecules in the air, and they react and form new molecules; we say the become oxidised. If they oxidise strongly enough and fast enough, we say they are burning.

Answer 2

Elements can be broken down by doing different things like heating a compound like sugar into solid carbon and water vapor. Elements CANNOT be broken down into anything else

hope i helped u out

Answer 3

because they are all together in a block and not fully spaced out all over the place bled x

Answer 4

The compounds are made by bonding different elements. The elements are bond with ionic or covalent bonds. So compounds can be broken into elements.

Answer 5

No, they do not

Answer 6

Because you're an orphan

Answer 7

yes all compounds can be decomposed.