A comparative study of the material balance method and oxidation number method in balancing complex redox equations has been carried out. The material balance method based on the fundamental law of mass conservation, in its modified form, gives a possibility to balance easier and faster the wide variety of complex redox equations. It is very useful for balancing of redox equations with two degrees of freedom that can be balanced with infinite sets of non multiple stoichiometric coefficients. If the reaction mechanism is unknown, the popular oxidation number method permits to obtain only one set of stoiciometric coefficients.
Dukov et al. (Tue,) studied this question.