9: Introduction to Acid-base Reactions
- Page ID
- 474636
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- 9.0: Prelude to Acid-base Reactions
- The glass flask sitting on a bench in Dr. Barry Marshall's lab in Perth, Western Australia, contained about thirty milliliters of a distinctly unappetizing murky, stinking yellowish liquid. A few days earlier he had poured a nutrient broth into the flask, then dropped in a small piece of tissue sample taken from the stomach of a patient suffering from chronic gastritis.
- 9.1: Overview of Acid-Base Reactions
- We’ll begin our discussion of acid-base chemistry with a couple of essential definitions. The first of these was proposed in 1923 by the Danish chemist Johannes Brønsted and the English chemist Thomas Lowry, and has come to be known as the Brønsted-Lowry definition of acidity and basicity.
- 9.2: The Acidity Constant
- You are no doubt aware that some acids are stronger than others. The relative acidity of different compounds or functional groups – in other words, their relative capacity to donate a proton to a common base under identical conditions – is quantified by a number called the acidity constant, abbreviated K
- 9.3: Structural Effects on Acidity and Basicity
- Now that we know how to quantify the strength of an acid or base, our next job is to gain an understanding of the fundamental reasons behind why one compound is more acidic or more basic than another. This is a big step: we are, for the first time, taking our knowledge of organic structure and applying it to a question of organic reactivity.