Home > Community > Why does tetrachloromethane have a higher boiling point than trichloromethane?
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Marinel Subu

Why does tetrachloromethane have a higher boiling point than trichloromethane?

Brian Bilson  Follow

tetrachloromethane has a higher mollecular mass than that of trichloromethane i.e tetrachloromethane has a Rmm=154 and trichloromethane has a Rmm=118.5thus the heavier the mollecule the greater the forces of attraction between the mollecules hence a high boiling point and vice versa

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Gaurav Raje  Follow
What about Polarity of molecules? Why are you not considering them as well ??More
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Ashwin Adhikari  Follow

Chloroform numerically has a relatively strong dipole moment, but the negative charge is distributed over three large chlorine atoms.

The positively charged hydrogen atom finds nothing it could really be attracted to.

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Ed McManus  Follow
@matt_black Ja, see other answer. I should probably just have commented there.More
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Edward Falk  Follow
Thats a little incomplete. Chloroform has a stronger dipole and that does matter. But it also has weaker london forces than carbon tetrachloride and those outweigh the strength of the dipole forces (it isnt that the dipole forces dont exist).More
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Anthony Picco  Follow

You also need to account for the difference in dispersion forces between the two molecules. Chlorine is much larger than hydrogen. Therefore tetrachloromethane has a larger molecular surface area which increases the intermolecular interaction strength. In this particular case, it outweighs the weak dipole interactions present in trichloromethane.

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