Gibbs energy

Gibbs energy is a term used to describe how much energy is available in a chemical reaction or a system. It is named after a scientist called Josiah Gibbs, who was very interested in how energy works.

Imagine you are building a Lego tower, and each Lego block is like a molecule in a chemical reaction. When you put the blocks together, you can use a certain amount of energy to make the tower. However, once the tower is built, it has some potential energy stored in it. This is similar to how a chemical reaction works. When the molecules react, they use up some energy to make the reaction happen, but there is still energy leftover that can be used to do something else.

Gibbs energy is a way to measure this leftover energy, and it tells you how much work a system can do if it has energy left over. For example, if you have a battery that's fully charged, it has a certain amount of Gibbs energy that can be used to power a device like a flashlight or a calculator.

So in conclusion, Gibbs energy is a measure of how much energy is available after a chemical reaction or in a system, just like how your Lego tower has potential energy stored in it after you build it.