Week 14 of 52: Electrophilic addition

The catching up continues furiously. Or maybe just aggressively. With a scowl-like expression at the very least. I don't feel like doing this right now, but I am forcing myself to, alright? I could force myself to do my actual schoolwork, but I'll do that later. Yes, I'm procrastinating on my schoolwork by writing a summary of a reaction. It's not that weird. There are weirder people. Plus, this hardly even counts because I'm padding it with nonsense like, well, pretty much this whole paragraph. So there's that...

An electrophilic addition reaction involves the breaking of a π-bond and the formation of two σ-bonds. For now, let's keep it simple and consider alkenes. These reactions also work on other molecules, like alkynes (hydrocarbons with at least one triple bond), but we'll move on to them later (or never).

And electrophile is sort of the opposite of a nucleophile. And you already know about nucleophiles because I already explained them. Remember?

Nucleophiles are attracted to positive charge. Remember: nucleii of atoms are positively charged.

Well, electrophiles are attracted to negative charge. And, as we all know, electrons are negatively charged. Alkanes consist of C—H σ-bonds and C—C σ-bonds. But in alkenes, there is at least one C=C bond (a π-bond). The double bond is stronger than the single C—C bonds are by themselves, but the π-bond portion of that double bond is significantly weaker and sort of more spread out. The electron density is more exposed to attack. And like nucleophiles, electrophiles attack.

I won't provide a list of common electrophiles right now. Maybe some other time (probably not). However, here's the general form of an electrophilic addition...
And there would be an electrophile in there somewhere, which would probably take up two of those new bonds that formed. You'll hopefully become more comfortable with this over the next month or so. I plan to post a few specific versions of addition reactions on alkenes, so perhaps May will be the month of addition reactions. Well, I'm actually still behind, so that doesn't really work. But shut up.