Question

After Mendeleeve published his work on the periodic table, Russian chemist Julia Lermontova continued working to classify and order the elements. She isolated and added six more elements, one of which was palladium (Pd). She was the first women to be awarded a doctorate in chemistry in Germany, in 1874. Write the electronic configuration for palladium

Answer 1

There is a rule the is usually followed when making the most stable electronic congifuration of elements.

It is as follows:

Where we from up to down following the arrows. s means it can hold up to 2 electrons, p can hold up to 6 and d can hold up to 10.

Palladium has atomic number 46, so, in its neutral form, it has 46 electrons.

We start by putting 2 into 1s, to get 1s².

The next 2 goes to 2s, to make 1s²2s².

Then, we go to 2p, so we can put 6 now to get 1s²2s²2p⁶.

For now, we have used 10 of the 46 electrons, so we need to continue.

Next we have 3s then 3p, so we get 1s²2s²2p⁶3s²3p⁶.

Then, we have 4s, so we have 1s²2s²2p⁶3s²3p⁶4s².

Now, we need to go to 3d, which hold up to 10 electrons. We used so far 20 electrons, so we can continue. We put 1s²2s²2p⁶3s²3p⁶4s²3d¹⁰.

Next we 4p and 5s, so we get 1s²2s²2p⁶3s²3p⁶4s²3d¹⁰4p⁶5s².

We have used 38 of the electrons so we only have 8 left. The next is 4d, but since we only have 8 electrons left, we can fill only up to 8, to get 1s²2s²2p⁶3s²3p⁶4s²3d¹⁰4p⁶5s²4d⁸.

So, the final electron configuration is 1s²2s²2p⁶3s²3p⁶4s²3d¹⁰4p⁶5s²4d⁸