Question

The Bleaching Action Of Chlorine Is An Oxidation Reaction Why?

Answer 1

Oxidation Reaction:

• Oxidation Reaction is known as the reaction, in which the oxidizing agent helps in the oxidation of the other substance while itself gets reduced.
• Also, during the oxidation reaction oxidizing agent gets changed from a higher oxidation state to a lower oxidation state and itself it gets changed to a lower state from a higher oxidation state.

The Bleaching Action Of Chlorine:

• The bleaching action of Chlorine undergoes through the process of an oxidation reaction as it needs moisture for its bleaching action.
• In this process, Chlorine acts as a powerful oxidizing and reacts with water to form Hydrochloric acid and Hypochlorous acid, from which the latter is known as unstable and quickly dissociates to give the nascent Oxygen, which can be shown as:

$$\begin{gathered} \underset{\left(\mathrm{Chlorine}\right)}{{\mathrm{Cl}}_2}+\underset{\left(\mathrm{water}\right)}{{\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{O}}\to \underset{\left(\mathrm{Hydrochloric}\mathrm{acid}\right)}{\mathrm{HCl}}+\underset{\left(\mathrm{Hypochlorous}\mathrm{acid}\right)}{\mathrm{HClO}} \\ \underset{\left(\mathrm{Hypochlorous}\mathrm{acid}\right)}{\mathrm{HClO}}\to \underset{\left(\mathrm{Hydrochloric}\mathrm{acid}\right)}{\mathrm{HCl}}+\underset{\left(\mathrm{Nascent}\mathrm{Oxygen}\right)}{\left[\mathrm{O}\right]} \end{gathered}$$

• Now, the Nascent oxygen formed reacts with color material and makes it colorless, which defines the reason why it is not good to use detergent or powder which have some bleaching agents because they make cloth light.
• $\mathrm{Colour}\mathrm{material}+\left[\mathrm{O}\right]\to \mathrm{colourless}$
• Hence, the formation of nascent oxygen is mainly responsible for the bleaching action of Chlorine in the presence of moisture.

Hence, the reason why the bleaching action of Chlorine is an Oxidation reaction has been explained above.