what makes something hydrophobic?

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what makes something hydrophobic?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

First you kinda have to know what polar/non-polar is. Water is polar, meaning that there is an imbalance of charge. Electrons gather in certain areas of molecules and this is the place where the negative charge is. For water this is at the oxygen. The other side of water is positive by default.

The opposite is a non-polar molcule which has equally spread out electrons/charge. So there is no negative or positive side.

Anyways, polar molecules and non-polar molecules don’t like each other. They don’t mix. well. But polar and polar molecules do, and so do non-polar and non-polar molecules.

So since water is polar, its not going to mix well with non-polar molecules, like oils and gasoline. So what makes something hydrophobic is that it is non-polar.

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