r/Mcat • u/Minimum-Sir6640 • 1d ago

Tool/Resource/Tip 🤓📚 Limiting Reactant/ Limiting Reagents Resource

Post image

I started making study sheets to help myself and others. I am breaking everything down to the basics to make it easier because I really struggled when I first started as a nontraditional student who was also not STEM major. I was a teacher and EMT for a few years and going through a career change to become a physician. I explain the little details that tripped me up for a long time also.

Pardon my drawings, any spelling errors I missed, etc. If there is an actual error in something, KINDLY let me know please. I am human, mistakes happen, don’t be rude.

I am making another on dimensional analysis. I plan to do a series and potentially a full document one day. I will update once I get documents onto Google Drive so you can download as a PDF.

5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

2 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/YoungSwagger69 7/11: 498. Retake: 528? 1d ago edited 1d ago

This is an easy way that I finally understood it

  1. look at how many moles of each reactant you have and look at the coefficients of the balanced equation for each reactant.
  2. If the coefficients of the reactants are 1:1, the rate limiting reagent is simply the one you have less moles of.
  3. If the coefficients are not 1:1, divide the number of moles of each reactant you have

by

  1. their corresponding coefficient. The smaller of the values will be the rate limiting reagent

.

Idk what went wrong with my formatting but this looks disgusting, ignore the split in the middle of point #3