Is an ionic bond stronger than a covalent bond?
It is very difficult to make a blanket statement about which type of bond is stronger. It depends on so many things. For example, someone posted that covalent bonds are stronger. HCl is a covalent compound. But if you bubble HCl through some water, it dissociates into H+ and Cl- (homolytic bond breaking). Al2O3 is an ionic compound that is insoluble in water. So if you compare HCl and Al2O3 by how the bonds hold up in water, Al2O3 wins. This is not an exception, there are way too many examples of this. Different things hold ionic and covalent compounds together. For ionic compounds, its electrostatics. For covalent compounds, the electrons are delocalized among two or more nuclei, which results in a lowering of energy (electrons like to have more space to move in – actually I am leaving out a lot of quantum mechanics). So, you can’t easily make this call. The best you can do is compare binding/lattice energies, but this works on a case by case basis. Sorry. there is really no easy answ
