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11: Complex Reaction Kinetics

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    477915
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    • 11.1: The Lindemann Mechanism
      The Lindemann mechanism was one of the first attempts to understand unimolecular reactions. Lindemann mechanisms have been used to model gas phase decomposition reactions. Although the net formula for a decomposition may appear to be first-order (unimolecular) in the reactant, a Lindemann mechanism may show that the reaction is actually second-order (bimolecular).
    • 11.2: Some Reaction Mechanisms Involve Chain Reactions
      Chain reactions usually consist of many repeating elementary steps, each of which has a chain carrier. Once started, chain reactions continue until the reactants are exhausted. Fire and explosions are some of the phenomena associated with chain reactions. The chain carriers are some intermediates that appear in the repeating elementary steps. These are usually free radicals.
    • 11.3: Catalysis
      There are many examples of reactions that involve catalysis. One that is of current importance to the chemistry of the environment is the catalytic decomposition of ozone
    • 11.4: The Michaelis-Menten Mechanism
      The Michaelis-Menten mechanism (Michaelis & Menten, 1913) is one which many enzyme mitigated reactions follow. The basic mechanism involves an enzyme (E, a biological catalyst) and a substrate (S) which must connect to form an enzyme-substrate complex (ES) in order for the substrate to be degraded (or augmented) to form a product (P).
    • 11.5: Isotherms are Plots of Surface Coverage as a Function of Gas Pressure at Constant Temperature
      The Langmuir isotherm was developed by Irving Langmuir in 1916 to describe the dependence of the surface coverage of an adsorbed gas on the pressure of the gas above the surface at a fixed temperature. Whilst the Langmuir isotherm is one of the simplest, it still provides a useful insight into the pressure dependence of the extent of surface adsorption.
    • 11.6: Atoms and Molecules can Physisorb or Chemisorb to a Surface
      We can address the question of what happens when a molecule becomes adsorbed onto a surface at two levels; specifically we can aim to identify the nature of the adsorbed species and its local adsorption geometry (i.e., its chemical structure and co-ordination to adjacent substrate atoms) the overall structure of the extended adsorbate/substrate interface (i.e., the long range ordering of the surface).
    • 11.7: Using Langmuir Isotherms to Derive Rate Laws for Surface-Catalyzed Gas-Phase Reactions
      It is possible to predict how the kinetics of certain heterogeneously-catalysed reactions might vary with the partial pressures of the reactant gases above the catalyst surface by using the Langmuir isotherm expression for equilibrium surface coverages.
    • 11.8: The Structure of a Surface is Different from that of a Bulk Solid
      The kinetics and thermodynamics of the chemical and physical processes that occur on the surface of a solid are greatly dependent on the structure of the surface. Few, if any surfaces are perfectly flat, and thus the cavities, protrusions, ridges, and edges of the surface must be treated differently when studying chemisorption and physisorption.
    • 11.9: The Haber-Bosch Reaction Can Be Surface Catalyzed
      The Haber-Bosch process for the synthesis of ammonia is one of the most important catalyzed syntheses in the chemical industry. The process takes advantage of the low activation energies required for the dissociative chemisorption of nitrogen and hydrogen molecules that have been physisorbed onto a metal oxide surface.
    • 11.10: Fluorescence
      Fluorescence, a type of luminescence, occurs in gas, liquid or solid chemical systems. Fluorescence is brought about by absorption of photons in the singlet ground state promoted to a singlet excited state. The spin of the electron is still paired with the ground state electron, unlike phosphorescence. As the excited molecule returns to ground state, it involves the emission of a photon of lower energy, which corresponds to a longer wavelength, than the absorbed photon.


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