When fire is created. In which like methane and oxygen molecules in a burner they move around and when he give them a spark they gain energy and move faster and break apart. And hit each other and loose energy in friction and sound, but what is this saying that they create more energy than the energy required to start the reaction. I really don’t understand that
In: Chemistry
In chemistry you get energy out of a system by going from a less stable state (higher energy state) to a more stable state (lower energy state).
Let’s say the it takes energy to break the methane and oxygen (CH4 and O2) into single atoms takes X energy. Forming the CO2 and H2O yields (gives out) 3X energy netting us 2X energy. Then the reaction is generating enough heat to start reactions between other molecules, that 3X energy could start 3 other reactions and will continue until all of the methane/oxygen are burned up. So we end up with 2X energy units out of this.
(In reality the math is a bit more complicated as the reaction is CH4+2O2=> CO2+2H2O and the bond energy for each molecule is different, but to find the energy you’d take the energy out from the products and subtract the energy input needed to break the bonds of the reactants)
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