Cyclic alkanes and conformations
Naming cyclic alkanes First you would count the longest carbon chain. You can see that the "cyclic" ring has 8 carbons, so it's octane. Since it's a cyclic ring, you call it a "cyclo" alkane. Hence, the main part of the molecule would be called cyclooctane. The substituent is called a methyl group, so you get the name methylcyclooctane. Now, the hard part of this is figuring out numberings. You can pick ANY carbon to be "1," so we'll conveniently choose the carbon that the methyl is on as methylcyclooctane. It wouldn't matter if the methyl group was on the top right carbon, because it would still be methylcyclooctane, because you could rotate that molecule to get the one above. Now, let's try two substituents. We again know it's a cyclooctane, but the problem arises in how to number the substituents. We could name this 1-methyl-3-ethylcyclooctane, or 1-ethyl-3-methylcyclooctane. We name it 1-ethyl-3-methylcyclooctane because of the ...