Period 3 element density and for its ability to resist corrosion due to the phenomenon of passivation. Structural components made from aluminium and its alloys are vital to the aerospace industry and are important in other areas of transportation and structural materials. The most useful compounds of aluminium, at least on a weight basis, are the oxides and sulfates. "Silicon" (symbol Si) is a tetravalent metalloid. It is less reactive than its chemical analog carbon, the nonmetal directly above it in the periodic table, but more reactive than germanium, the metalloid directly below it in the table. Controversy about silicon's character dates to
Chemical equation a 2 before O, giving the balanced equation: This equation does not have any coefficients in front of CH and CO, since a coefficient of 1 is dropped. Generally, any chemical equation involving "J" different molecules can be written as: where "R" is the symbol for the "j-th" molecule, and ν is the stoichiometric coefficient for the "j-th" molecule, positive for products, negative for reactants (or vice versa). A properly balanced chemical equation will then obey: where the composition matrix "a" is the number of atoms of element "i" in molecule "j". Any vector which, when operated upon by the