okay i don't know if this will make sense in english, i'm studying in swedish but i'm wondering about the noble gas structure of say 23V (Vanadium) that becomes a bit odd in the process of splitting it up into the electron shells.

2 in the k shell
8 in the l shell

that's 10 placed, 13 to go

total of 18 in the m-shell is maximum but to achieve noble gas structure they can only have max 8 electrons in the outer shell.

this is the part that confuses me, for most of the elements i know how to do this but this one and a few others become weird..

if we now have 13 left to place, why can't i put f.e 8 in the m-shell and 5 in the n-shell? when i google the structure of Vanadium it says:
k 2
l 8
m 11
n 2

why 11 in the m and not 8 as previously mentioned? that's my only question, hope it's not too unclear!

It's a transition metal. Transition metals in the 4th row will fill the 3rd shell to 18

Can you elaborate on this? It's still vague the way you put it

Just do subshell configuration for it:
Table:
1s
2s 2p
3s 3p 3d
4s 4p 4d 4f

s subshell has a max of 2 electrons
p subshell has a max of 6 electrons
d subshell has a max of 10 electrons

Then you just move diagonally (right to left) through the subshell table until you get to the number electrons needed. Since you are doing noble gas configuration, we will first start with Argon.
So finding the subshell configuration for Argon(18) is: 1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 -- the number before the subshell tells you which main shell it is in and the second number tells you how many electrons in the subshell. if you add up all of the second numbers you will get 18, so we are finished with Argon.
This leaves us with:
V[Ar]. Now we just need to finish the subshell configuration until we reach 23 electrons
1s2 2s2 2p6 3s2 3p6 4s2 3d3 - This completes it and it leaves us with 2-8-11-2 as the structure for V :

The noble gas configuration would be:
V[Ar]3d3 4s2

How you move through the subshell table in case it was confusing:


This post was edited by kasey21 on Feb 18 2019 05:15pm