A tricycle factory gets a shipment with 300 seats and 500 wheels. Using your ideas about Limiting Reactants how many tricycles can be made?

Answer 1

The limiting reactant in a chemical reaction can be thought of as the reactant that will run out first. This question seeks to help you understand this by referring to parts of a tricycle rather than often confusing molecular compounds.

As you may know, tricycles are constructed in a way in which they have 3 wheels. In addition, they usually only have 1 seat for 1 person to ride the tricycle. Knowing this, we can form a "chemical reaction" for how the tricycle factor produces its tricycles as follows...

1 seat + 3 wheels -> 1 tricycle

Now we need to determine whether the factory will run out of seats or wheels first given that they only have 300 seats and 500 wheels on hand. To do this, can use stoichometry (using the coefficient ratios found in the equation above as a conversion factor) to determine the total number of tricycles we can produce using each of the materials separately. Whichever material produces the least number of tricycles is the limiting reagent.

300 seats * (1 tricycle/1s seat) = 300 tricycles

500 wheels * (1 tricycle / 3 wheels) = 166.67 tricycles

As we see, the wheels (even though there are more of them) is the limiting reactant because we will run out of them before we run out of seats. Therefore, the factory can only make 166 tricycles

Hope this helps!!

Answer 2

If you look at an "equation" for making a tricycle, you might see something like this...

1 seat + 3 wheels = 1 trike

If you take the number of each that you have and divide by the coefficient, you can easily find the limiting item.

300 seats ÷ 1 = 300

500 wheels ÷ 3 = 167

So 167 is < than 300 and that means Wheels are Limiting as you will run out of them long before you run out of seats

Answer 3

With 300 seats they can make 300 trikes, but this would require 900 wheels. So, in this case they number of wheels limits how many bikes they can make. Needing three wheels per bike, they can only make 166 bikes; so, they have enough seats.

In this case the limiting item is the number of wheels available.