Inorganic Chemistry
Inorganic chemistry is the branch of chemistry concerned with compounds where elements other than carbon play an important role. The chemistry of compounds based upon carbon is known as organic chemistry, although the two disciplines frequently overlap, most notably in the field of organometallic chemistry.
Major branches of inorganic chemistry include
- Minerals, such as salt, asbestos, silicates, , ...
- Metals and their alloys, like iron, copper, aluminum, brass, bronze, ...
- Compounds involving non-metallic elements, like silicon, phosphorus, ,chlorine, oxygen, for example water
- Metal complexes
Some important inorganic products are silicon chips, transistors, LCD screens, fiber optics and Catalysts.
Inorganic chemistry often overlaps with mineralogy, geochemistry,analytical chemistry, environmental chemistry, physical chemistry, and organometallic chemistry.
Organometallic chemistry combines aspects of organic chemistry with inorganic chemistry, and is formally defined as the study of organic compounds containing metal-carbon bonds, although many "organometallic compounds" contain no such bonds. Vitamin B12, whose active site is similar to that of haemoglobin, is a naturally-occurring, metabolically-important organometallic compound containing a large organic components (corrin and protein), a metal (cobalt), a bond between the metal and the carbon of a methyl group.
Despite the presence of metal ions and metal-carbon bonds, compounds such as calcium carbonate and nickel tetracarbonyl are usually regarded as inorganic - rather than organometallic - compounds.
Much of inorganic chemistry deals with molecular compounds, i.e many inorganic materials have a structure that can be described in terms of molecules but many others do not. The study of such solids is called solid state chemistry.
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