If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

Main content

Enthalpy

Learn about enthalpy, a key term in understanding heat transfer in chemical reactions. Explore how reactions can either release or absorb energy, impacting the temperature of their surroundings. Uncover the significance of enthalpy in determining whether a reaction will occur and its role in the fascinating phenomena of endothermic and exothermic reactions. Created by Jasmine Rana.

Want to join the conversation?

  • female robot grace style avatar for user Premed Nerd
    So can bond formation be endothermic or endothermic? Endothermic when put in energy to put two unfavorable reactants to make a product and also could be exothermic when take two high energy reactants and put them together to make a more stable (less Energy) product and where energy is released? Someone clarify!
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • leaf green style avatar for user madaboutmed
      I'm not sure why she didn't cover this in the video.

      When we're making bonds, energy is released and Delta H is negative (exothermic).
      When we're breaking bonds, energy is required and Delta H is positive (endothermic).

      On chemwiki, they used the analogy that being married is more favorable (exothermic) and getting divorced requires a lot of energy (endothermic).
      (14 votes)
  • old spice man green style avatar for user Petrie (Peter S. Asiain III)
    Does enthalpy have anything to do with entropy in some way? The two seems to be related in nature.
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • blobby green style avatar for user epouvantails.phd
      They may sound the same, but the two are different ideas. Enthalpy is the change in energy of a system (in this case heat); this energy can move out of the system and into the surroundings (or vice versa). Entropy is more about the system itself and the system's capacity to move toward disorder. While both ideas have to deal with energy, they are separate and not synonymous. The Gibb's Free Energy equation uses both of these to decide if a reaction is spontaneous or non-spontaneous (enthalpy is represented as ΔH and entropy is represented as ΔS).
      Simply, just think of enthalpy as the change in heat (is a system losing or gaining heat, i.e., energy?). Think of entropy as something becoming more ordered or more disordered.
      However, the two are related as denoted by the Gibb's Free Energy Equation. If you want, you can look at it this way by rearranging the equation:
      ΔH = ΔG + TΔS
      or
      ΔS = (ΔH - ΔG)/T
      I believe this is outside of the context of the MCAT and more into the realm of thermodynamics. :)

      (If anyone can enhance this further or correct me where I may have made an error, please do!)
      (5 votes)
  • duskpin ultimate style avatar for user Rebecca Tsai
    I don't understand what the system is if the body is the surrounding. I understand that sweating is endothermic (contrary to what a lot of articles online say: sweating is exothermic) but I don't understand what the system is.
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • male robot hal style avatar for user Kevin Hernandez
      The terms "surroundings" and "system" are relative, you always have to define them before doing any of the math. If you define the body as the system and the sweat as the surroundings, then sweating is indeed an exothermic process as heat is being transferred from the body (system) to the sweat (surroundings). If you define the system as the sweat and the surroundings as the body, the reaction is endothermic as the system (sweat) is gaining heat from the surroundings (the body).

      The takeaway here is that the systems must be defined before proceeding with the question. Furthermore, the heat transfer must zero out as a consequence of conservation of energy. More specifically, the heat lost by any system must be gained by the surroundings, and vice versa.
      (5 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user nayana.jellawar
    What happens when both the body have reached the same amount of heat
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user Emily Bovasso
    So technically spontaneity and heat release do not go hand in hand such that an exothermic reaction doesn't necessarily mean its spontaneous and an endothermic reaction doesn't necessarily mean its non-spontaneous... right?
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user bizarrella
    So in the example around , what is the system? The environment?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user Colorado
    OMG I finally get it thank you!
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user

Video transcript

So we've been talking kind of at a very macro level about heat transfer by using an example of heat being transferred between our hand and a glass of water. So now let's go more of a micro level. Let's talk about heat transfer and chemical reactions. So when we're talking about heat transfer and chemical reactions we're talking about the term called enthalpy. Now it turns out that if we think about chemical reactions as our system, so go ahead and write that here, chemical reactions can either release or absorb energy that can change the temperature of its surroundings. Which we generally think of when we're talking about chemical reactions as the solution that the chemical reaction is taking place in, and of course if the chemical reaction is taking place in our body the surrounding is really just our body, which you can think of really as just a big bag of water. So a question might be on your mind. Why did chemists come up with this fancy term enthalpy to describe the heat transfer of chemical reactions? It turns out that enthalpy is a very useful quantity to calculate for many chemical reactions because not only does it tell us something about heat transfer, but it also is a component of Gibbs free energy, which is an important parameter that chemists use to determine whether or not a reaction will take place or not. Generally speaking, I think it's OK to conceptualize with some simplification that enthalpy is essentially just a fancy term to describe heat transfer for chemical reactions. And because we can never define an absolute quantity of heat, because remember heat is the amount of energy transferred, it's not an absolute term, enthalpy is always referred to as a change in enthalpy, and oftentimes it's written as delta H. And specifically this change in enthalpy describes the change in heat energy. That is whether heat was lost or gained from the perspective of the system. So even thought that there is this kind of important interplay, this conservation of energy between the system and the surroundings, this term enthalpy is really just telling us what's happening from the perspective of the system. And I think this will make more sense as I give you an example below, but before I do that I just want to note what the units of enthalpy are. And the units of enthalpy are joules per mole of reactant in the chemical reaction. And this of course makes sense because joules is a unit of energy, and we're talking about heat, which is a form of energy. And it's notable to know that having it per mole allows us to take the amount of whatever is reacting into account. This is something that we can't really take into account if we just, say, measure the change in temperature that occurred over the course of a reaction. All right, so now let's go ahead and take a look at an example. So I'm going to go ahead and scroll down. Let's go ahead and use an example that you will be fairly familiar with. So when our bodies get super hot to cool ourselves down our bodies essentially evaporate water from the surface of our body to help cool ourselves down. And this is really just a fancy way of saying that we start sweating. Right? Now the chemical reaction for sweating we can really think about as just essentially the evaporation of water. So that is to say taking water from the liquid phase and turning it into water vapor, or water in the gaseous phase. The change in enthalpy for this particular reaction, and note that I'm saying for this particular reaction, for our system, is defined as the enthalpy of our product, which is our water in its gaseous form, minus the enthalpy of our reactant, which is water in its liquid form. This of course is a way to conceptualize enthalpy, but remember it's really actually not possible to measure an absolute quantity of enthalpy for anything. We can only ever measure this change in enthalpy, which involves monitoring the change in temperature of the surroundings during the course of a reaction as well as some other considerations that we're not going to go into in this video. But just to note that it's really the change in enthalpy that we're measuring and not these absolute quantities, even though technically this is how we're conceptualizing enthalpy. So the key idea here about this process of evaporation is that it requires energy to occur. Just think about boiling water. In order to get water into its gaseous phase you need to heat it up. So the fact that we're adding energy to our system should tell you something about what this sign of this change in enthalpy should be. The products are essentially gaining more energy in the form of heat than the reactants. So we say that in a process that absorbs heat the change in enthalpy is greater than 0. In other words, the change in enthalpy is positive. And whenever a reaction has a positive change in enthalpy, which by definition means that heat is being absorbed, we call it an endothermic reaction. And the way that I like to remember this is that endo is I think a Latin prefix for within. So heat is going in to our system, which is our chemical reaction. So you're probably wondering at this point, well, if we're absorbing heat, how is this connected to us cooling off? Well, this is kind of the important point that I alluded to before. This change in enthalpy only tells us what's going on with our system, which of course is our chemical reaction, but our body in this case is our surrounding. So we can use this relationship above that tells us that the heat lost or gained by the system is equal and opposite to the heat lost or gained by the surroundings. So in this case we know that our system is absorbing heat, which means that our surroundings, our body, must be losing heat. And that's how we cool down. Now you can also imagine that we have chemical reactions in which the change in enthalpy is less than 0, and we call these types of reactions exothermic reactions. And the way I kind of think about these is that ex, this ex term is kind of a Latin prefix for out of. So heat essentially is going out of the system instead of being absorbed. One example of a very prevalent reaction in our bodies that is exothermic is the hydrolysis, or reaction with water, of ATP, which is of course the energy currency of our cells. So ATP reacts with water, and it loses a phosphate group to become ADP and a free phosphate group. And this reaction has a negative change in enthalpy, or in other words it releases heat. The fast that this reaction is exothermic is physiologically significant for many reasons. But one of those reasons is when we're talking about shivering. So we all know that we shiver when we're cold. And the reason we do that is because we want to warm ourselves up. And that heat energy is indirectly tied to this hydrolysis of ATP which releases heat and allows our muscles to contract to warm us up. So just to wrap things up here, I think the key takeaway is that enthalpy describes heat transfers for chemical reactions, and notably it's from the perspective of the chemical reaction, not the surroundings. And so chemical reactions can either lose heat, in which case they are classified as exothermic reactions and having a negative enthalpy, or they require an input of heat, and they're classified as endothermic, and have a positive change in enthalpy.