Nitrogen is what kind of element

Nitrogen tanks are also replacing carbon dioxide as the main power source for paintball guns. But, nitrogen must be kept at higher pressure than CO 2 , making N 2 tanks heavier and more expensive. Boundless vets and curates high-quality, openly licensed content from around the Internet. This particular resource used the following sources:. Skip to main content. Nonmetallic Elements. Search for:. Properties of Nitrogen. Learning Objective Discuss the properties of nitrogen. Key Points Nitrogen is a chemical element with symbol N and atomic number 7.

Nitrogen gas is an industrial gas produced by the fractional distillation of liquid air or by mechanical means using gaseous air.

Commercial nitrogen is often a byproduct of air-processing for industrial concentration of oxygen. Nitrogen gas has a variety of applications, including serving as an inert replacement for air where oxidation is undesirable. Liquid nitrogen is also used to cryogenically freeze objects.

Show Sources Boundless vets and curates high-quality, openly licensed content from around the Internet. Nitrogen is essential to life as it is necessary to the formation of amino acids, proteins and nucleic bases such as DNA and RNA.

What type of element is nitrogen? Chemistry Matter Elements. Jan 21, David Drayer. Nitrogen is a non metal of the Group VA with five valance electrons. Explanation: As an element nitrogen forms a diatomic molecule. Image explanation. The wheat sheaf symbol and lightning reflect the importance of nitrogen to living things.

Nitrogen is important to the chemical industry. It is used to make fertilisers, nitric acid, nylon, dyes and explosives. To make these products, nitrogen must first be reacted with hydrogen to produce ammonia. This is done by the Haber process. Nitrogen gas is also used to provide an unreactive atmosphere. It is used in this way to preserve foods, and in the electronics industry during the production of transistors and diodes. Large quantities of nitrogen are used in annealing stainless steel and other steel mill products.

Annealing is a heat treatment that makes steel easier to work. Liquid nitrogen is often used as a refrigerant. It is used for storing sperm, eggs and other cells for medical research and reproductive technology.

It is also used to rapidly freeze foods, helping them to maintain moisture, colour, flavour and texture. Biological role. It is taken up by green plants and algae as nitrates, and used to build up the bases needed to construct DNA, RNA and all amino acids.

Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Animals obtain their nitrogen by consuming other living things. They digest the proteins and DNA into their constituent bases and amino acids, reforming them for their own use. Microbes in the soil convert the nitrogen compounds back to nitrates for the plants to re-use. Crop yields can be greatly increased by adding chemical fertilisers to the soil, manufactured from ammonia. If used carelessly the fertiliser can leach out of the soil into rivers and lakes, causing algae to grow rapidly.

This can block out light preventing photosynthesis. The dissolved oxygen soon gets used up and the river or lake dies. Natural abundance. It is obtained by the distillation of liquid air. Around 45 million tonnes are extracted each year. It is found, as compounds, in all living things and hence also in coal and other fossil fuels. Help text not available for this section currently. Elements and Periodic Table History.

Nitrogen in the form of ammonium chloride, NH 4 Cl, was known to the alchemists as sal ammonia. It was manufactured in Egypt by heating a mixture of dung, salt and urine. Nitrogen gas itself was obtained in the s by both Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley and they did this by removing the oxygen from air. They noted it extinguished a lighted candle and that a mouse breathing it would soon die. Neither man deduced that it was an element.

The first person to suggest this was a young student Daniel Rutherford in his doctorate thesis of September at Edinburgh, Scotland. Atomic data. Bond enthalpies. Glossary Common oxidation states The oxidation state of an atom is a measure of the degree of oxidation of an atom. Oxidation states and isotopes. Glossary Data for this section been provided by the British Geological Survey. Relative supply risk An integrated supply risk index from 1 very low risk to 10 very high risk.

Recycling rate The percentage of a commodity which is recycled. Substitutability The availability of suitable substitutes for a given commodity. Reserve distribution The percentage of the world reserves located in the country with the largest reserves. Political stability of top producer A percentile rank for the political stability of the top producing country, derived from World Bank governance indicators. Political stability of top reserve holder A percentile rank for the political stability of the country with the largest reserves, derived from World Bank governance indicators.

Supply risk. Young's modulus A measure of the stiffness of a substance. Shear modulus A measure of how difficult it is to deform a material. Bulk modulus A measure of how difficult it is to compress a substance.

Vapour pressure A measure of the propensity of a substance to evaporate. Pressure and temperature data — advanced. Listen to Nitrogen Podcast Transcript :. You're listening to Chemistry in its element brought to you by Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

This week, we're blowing up airbags, asphyxiating animals and getting to the bottom of gunpowder because Cambridge chemist Peter Wothers has been probing the history of nitrogen. It's by far the most abundant element in its group in the periodic table and yet it is the last member of its family to be discovered.

The other elements in its group, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony and bismuth, had all been discovered, used and abused at least years before nitrogen was known about. It wasn't really until the 18 th Century that people focussed their attention on the chemistry of the air and the preparation properties of different gases.

We can only really make sense of the discovery of nitrogen by also noting the discovery of some of these other gases. Robert Boyle noted in that when acid was added to iron filings, the mixture grew very hot and belched up copious and stinking fumes. So inflammable it was that upon the approach of a lighted candle to it, it would readily enough take fire and burn with a bluish and somewhat greenish flame.

Hydrogen was more carefully prepared and collected by the brilliant but reclusive millionaire scientist Henry Cavendish about a years later. Cavendish called the gas inflammable air from the metals in recognition of this most striking property. He also studied the gas we know call carbon dioxide, which had first been prepared by the Scottish chemist, Joseph Black in the s. Black called carbon dioxide fixed air, since it was thought to be locked up or fixed in certain minerals such as limestone.

It could be released from its stony prison by the action of heat or acids. Carbon dioxide was also known by the name mephitic air the word mephitic meaning noxious or poisonous.

This name obviously came from its property of destroying life, since it rapidly suffocates any animals immersed in it. This is where the confusion with nitrogen gas begins, since pure nitrogen gas is also suffocating to animals. If the oxygen in an enclosed quantity of air is used up, either by burning a candle in it or by confining an animal, most of the oxygen is converted to carbon dioxide gas which mixes with the nitrogen gas present in the air.

This noxious mixture no longer supports life and so was called mephitic. The crucial experiment in the discovery of nitrogen was when it was realized that there are at least two different kinds of suffocating gases in this mephitic air. This was done by passing the mixture of gases through a solution of alkali, which absorbed the carbon dioxide but left behind the nitrogen gas. Cavendish prepared nitrogen gas by this means. He passed air back and forth over heated charcoal which converted the oxygen in the air to carbon dioxide.

The carbon dioxide was then dissolved in alkali leaving behind the inert nitrogen gas, which he correctly observed was slightly less dense than common air. Unfortunately, Cavendish didn't publish his findings.

He just communicated them in a letter to fellow scientist, Joseph Priestley, one of the discoverers of oxygen gas. Consequently, the discovery of nitrogen is usually accredited to one of Joseph Black's students, the Scottish scientist, Daniel Rutherford, who's also the uncle of the novelist and poet, Sir Walter Scott.

Rutherford published his findings, which was similar to those of Cavendish in his doctoral thesis entitled, "An Inaugural Dissertation on the Air called Fixed or Mephitic" in So what about the name, nitrogen? In the late s, chemical nomenclature underwent a major revolution under the guidance of the French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier. It was he and his colleagues, who suggested many of the names we still use today including the word hydrogen, which comes from the Greek meaning water former and oxygen from the Greek for acid producer, since Lavoisier mistakenly thought that oxygen was the key component of all acids.

However, in his list of the then known elements, Lavoisier included the term azote or azotic gas for what we now call nitrogen.