COLLIGATIVE

PROPERTIES
PHYSICAL-CHEMISTRY
DR. MARIO VELKA

A colligative property is a property of a solvent modified by

the concentration of the solute. It is independent of the
solute identity.

Polar solutes vs ionic

solutes.

VAPOR PRESSURE LOWERING.

Raoult's Law:
Before we dig into the details, we present Raoult's Law. This gives the vapor pressure of a
solution but, strictly speaking, is only a colligative property if the solute is nonvolatile. The
general form of Raoult's law (for a two-component system the solute as "A" and the solvent
as "B") is
where the term at the left is the total vapor pressure of the solution, xAand xB are the solute
and solvent mole fractions, respectively, and PA0and PB0 are the vapor pressures of the pure
components (again, respectively). Now, if the solute is nonvolatile (that is, PA0 = 0), then the
solution vapor pressure is just

In this form, the solution vapor pressure is a colligative property. The form at the right gives
is as a function of SOLVENT vapor pressure and SOLUTE concentration; this is how the other
colligative properties are defined.

Boiling point elevation.

If one dissolves a nonvolatile substance (e.g., sucrose or
NaCl) in a volatile solvent (e.g., water), the boiling point is
increased by an amount, Tb. Why this happens should be
obvious. Recall that the boiling point is when the vapor
pressure of a liquid reaches 1 atm. If a nonvolatile solute
be present, then the mole fraction of solvent is decreased
and we must raise the temperature to get back to 1 atm.
Traditionally, this is expressed as
where Kb is the boiling point elevation constant and m is

FREEZING POINT DEPRESSION.

The freezing point depression Tf is a colligative
property of the solution, and for dilute solutions is
found to be proportional to the molal
concentration cm of the solution:

Where Kf is called the freezing-point-depression

constant.

OSMOTIC PRESSURE
In this case, we have a solution and solvent (or two
solutions at different concentrations) separated by
asemipermeable membrane.This membrane is simply a
membrane which passes only solvent molecules; solute
molecules cannot pass through it. This disparity sets up a
pressure which is called theosmotic pressure.(Strictly
speaking, the osmotic pressure is the pressure you need to
apply to restore the system to equilibrium; however, since
this equals the pressure set up by the disparity, we can
ignore this here.)

On the left is the

initial state of the
system; on the right
is what occurs when
the system comes
to equilibrium.

 In all cases, osmotic pressure is given by the equation (at least to a good first
approximation)

Note that this looks a lot like the ideal gas law equation. In fact, this equation holds
for ideal solutions. The only difference here is that we have replaced "P" with "P"
This latter symbol is just capital "pi" in the Greek alphabet. If you recall that c = n/V
for a solute, then this takes the form

Here, cA is just the solute molarity.

Existe tambin una funcin de

las propiedades coligativas
que es de mayor importancia
que las anteriores y consiste
en la smosis celular. Una
clula est rodeada de una
membrana semipermeable.
Normalmente su interior tiene
ms concentracin de
molculas grandes que el
exterior, por eso el agua de su
alrededor puede fluir desde el
exterior al interior. Es el modo
que tienen las clulas para
beber agua y mantenerse
con vida.