Have you ever wondered how car manufacturers descide how much of each reactant to put into an airbag? How the government controls pollution? How about how reactant proportions role play in engine efficiency? In this essay, I will explain the history of stoichiometry, its practical uses, and I will show two chemical equasions with explinations.
Stoichiometry is a branch of chemistry that deals with the application of the laws of definite proportions and of the conservation of mass and energy to chemical activity. Stoichiometry also obeys the definition: the quantitative relationship between two or more substances especially in processes involving physical or chemical change.
Stoichiometry's history is one that is difficult to find and very scarce of information once found. The principles of stoichiometry were first layed down by a man by the name of Jeremias Benjaim Richter. Jeremias Benjaim Richter was born in 1762, and he died in the year of 1807. he only lived to the age of fourty-five. Speaking origenally german, he said in the year of 1792, and I quote, "Die sta‚ ¶chyometrie ist die Wissenschaft die quantitativen oder Massenverha‚ ¤ltnisse zu messen, in welchen die chymischen Elemente gegen einander stehen." In English this roughly translates to, "Stoichiometry is the science of measuring the quantitative proportions or mass ratios in which chemical elements stand to one another.".
Stoichiometry is very important to peoples lives. Stoichiometry controls the airbags that save many peoples lives each year. Timing is crucial in the airbag's ability to save lives in a head-on collision. An airbag must be able to deploy in a matter of milliseconds from the initial collision impact. It must also be prevented from deploying when there is no collision. Because of this, the first component of the airbag system is a sensor that can detect many sorts of different collisions from many different angles and immediately trigger the airbag's deployment.
