Monday, January 31, 2011

Monday, January 31st, 2011

Before we started Chapter 14, I covered the topics from Exp #16. In this lab you will need to determine the molecular weight of an unknown by calculating its freezing point depression.

Chapter 14 is titled Chemical Kinetics, which analyze how fast (or how slow) a reaction occurs. We discussed Section 14.1, 14.2 and part of 14.3. Section 14.1 outlines why kinetics are important and 14.2 discusses rates of reactions in terms of reaction stoichiometry. One thing to note is that rate is not a constant. It varies as the reaction progresses. Since these rates are exponential we use the instantaneous rate of change, or slope of the tangent line to calculate an instantaneous rate.

We also need to know how to set up a rate law expression for each reaction and from experimental data, know how to calculate the overall order of a particular reaction and the order with respect to each reactant.

We will continue with the rate laws on Wednesday.

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