How many pi bonds are present in caffeine?
1 Answer
Jan 3, 2015
The caffeine molecule has 4 pi bonds.
Every time you are asked to determine the number of pi or sigma bonds in a compound, you must draw its Lewis structure.
Here's how the caffeine molecule looks like:
The important thing to remember is that double bonds are comprised of 1 sigma bond and 1 pi bond and triple bonds are comprised of 1 sigma bond and 2 pi bonds.
Caffeine's Lewis structure shows that no triple bonds are present; however, four double bonds are, which means that the number of pi bonds in a caffeine molecule is equal to 4.
By comparison, caffeine has 25 sigma bonds.
