Stoichiometry 🤛🤛🖕

Stoichiometry is at the heart of the production of many things we use in our daily lives. In
chemistry, it is very important to understand the relationship between the reactants and products in a
reaction. Stoichiometry is exactly that.

Jeremias Benjamin Richter defined stoichiometry in 1792 as the science of measuring quantities
or mass ratios of chemical elements. Given a chemical reaction, stoichiometry tells us what quantity of
each reactant we need to get enough of the product we want. But how important exactly is the
knowledge of stoichiometry in real life?

At home, we can use stoichiometry in baking or cooking. If you were almost out of a specific
ingredient, you could use your knowledge in stoichiometric calculations to figure out how much of every
other ingredient you would need. In medicine, everything from determining the amount of mg/ml to
finding the amount of reactant a reaction needs to proceed can be deemed part of stoichiometry. These
measurements are necessary to make sure that the approximate amount of a certain chemical can be
found in the medicine that they dispense. Stoichiometry is also used in the industry quite often to know
the number of materials required to produce the desired number of products in a given equation.
Stoichiometric calculations can help scientists and engineers working in an industry to estimate the
number of products they will obtain from a given procedure.

Furthermore, Farmers can also use this knowledge to determine how much fertilizer to use for
their crops, or if you simply just want to figure out how fast you need to go to get somewhere in a small
period of time.

Stoichiometry can be difficult because it builds upon several individual skills and it may not seem
very interesting, but actually, it is one of the most important and fundamental topics in chemistry
because of its uses in chemical engineering, in research, and its contribution to our daily lives.