Alcohols

Content created by Jonathan Prieto-Cubides, Fredrik Bakke, Egbert Rijke and Amélia Liao.

Created on 2022-07-05.
Last modified on 2025-10-31.

module organic-chemistry.alcohols where
Imports 
open import foundation.cartesian-product-types
open import foundation.decidable-subtypes
open import foundation.dependent-pair-types
open import foundation.negation
open import foundation.propositional-truncations
open import foundation.universe-levels
open import foundation.unordered-pairs

open import organic-chemistry.hydrocarbons
open import organic-chemistry.saturated-carbons

Idea

An alcohol is a hydrocarbon with at least one -OH group. The type of alcohols can therefore be defined as the type of hydrocarbons equipped with a distinguished subset of the available (unbonded) electrons of the carbon atoms.

Definition

alcohol : UU (lsuc lzero)
alcohol =
  Σ ( hydrocarbon lzero lzero)
    ( λ X →
      Σ ( (c : vertex-hydrocarbon X) →
          decidable-subtype lzero (electron-carbon-atom-hydrocarbon X c))
        ( λ OH →
          ( ( c c' : vertex-hydrocarbon X) →
            ( b : edge-hydrocarbon X (standard-unordered-pair c c')) →
            ¬ (is-in-decidable-subtype (OH c) (bonding-hydrocarbon X b))) ×
          ( ( type-trunc-Prop
              ( Σ ( vertex-hydrocarbon X)
                  ( λ c → type-decidable-subtype (OH c)))) ×
            ( ( c : vertex-hydrocarbon X) →
              type-decidable-subtype (OH c) →
              is-saturated-carbon-hydrocarbon X c))))

More explicitly, an alcohol is a hydrocarbon equipped with, for each of its carbons, a subset of its electrons, where membership in that subset indicates whether or not a hydroxyl group is bonded to that specific electron. We require the following conditions:

  • The electron shared between a carbon atom and a hydroxyl group can not also be shared between that carbon atom and a different carbon.
  • There must be at least one hydroxyl group.
  • Atoms to which hydroxyl groups are bonded must be saturated.

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