Hess's law

Hess's law of constant heat summation, also known as Hess's law (or Hess' law), is a relationship in physical chemistry named after Germain Hess, a Swiss-born Russian chemist and physician who published it in 1840. The law states that the total enthalpy change during the complete course of a chemical reaction is the same whether the reaction is made in one step or in several steps.

Hess's law is now understood as an expression of the principle of conservation of energy, also expressed in the first law of thermodynamics, and the fact that the enthalpy of a chemical process is independent of the path taken from the initial to the final state (i.e. enthalpy is a state function). Reaction enthalpy changes can be determined by calorimetry for many reactions. The values are usually stated for processes with the same initial and final temperatures and pressures, although the conditions can vary during the reaction. Hess's law can be used to determine the overall energy required for a chemical reaction, when it can be divided into synthetic steps that are individually easier to characterize. This affords the compilation of standard enthalpies of formation, that may be used as a basis to design complex syntheses.

Hess's law states that the change of enthalpy in a chemical reaction (i.e. the heat of reaction at constant pressure) is independent of the pathway between the initial and final states.

In other words, if a chemical change takes place by several different routes, the overall enthalpy change is the same, regardless of the route by which the chemical change occurs (provided the initial and final condition are the same).

Hess's law allows the enthalpy change (ΔH) for a reaction to be calculated even when it cannot be measured directly. This is accomplished by performing basic algebraic operations based on the chemical equations of reactions using previously determined values for the enthalpies of formation.

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