Chemical Balancer Documentation

---

The Chemical Balancer

To use the balancer, enter the equation and press the RETURN key. The formula consists of a series of terms separated by plus signs on either side of the equals sign which divides the inputs and products of the reaction. Each term may have a numerical mole count prefix followed by a series of elements (or parenthesized terms) followed by repeat counts. It will accept lower case element symbols, but this can lead to ambiguity. Is si silicon or sulphur iodine? You can disambiguate by using upper case letters, except for the second letter in a two letter element symbol e.g. Si versus SI.

When you enter an equation and type RETURN, you will get a pop up equation balancing window:

The Equation Balancer, before balancing

You can manually balance the equation by entering new mole counts, as appropriate, in front of each term in the formula. It will update the atom counts on each side for you. If you just can't hack it, you can use the Balance It For Me button which will attempt to solve a system of linear equations. Sometimes it gets a bit wonky, but it can usually figure things out.

After a moderately messy balancing

Press the Done button to get back to the equation entry window. It will present you with the new, ideally balanced formula:

It gives the mole count and molecular weight of each term. You can double click on any of the cells in the Sample Weight column and enter a number. It will automatically calculate the corresponding number of grams of each chemical in the formula.