August 30, 2013

Physical Chemistry – Overview of Thermodynamics

In one example I use bond energies to calculate the energy per mole of sucrose and TNT (the explosive trinitrotoluene). Most students expect that TNT has more energy, but it turns out the two have about the same. So why is TNT an explosive (actually a conflagration)? TNT burns rapidly and involves a huge volume change. It is the rate of reaction (chemical kinetics) and the rapid volume change that causes the explosive damage. Then I can move to the thermodynamics overview.
June 6, 2011

The Chemical Kinetics of Sobering Up

The time to reduce 4 beers to 2 is two hours. The time to go from 2 beers to 1 is one hour, and the time to go from 1 beer to the legal limit is 30 minutes. It therefore takes a whooping 3.5 hours to reach the legal limit: 4 beers take seven times longer to metabolize than 1 beer.
February 4, 2010

Plotting Chemical Kinetics–steady state

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgcxUjY021E In this video one of the many uses of plotting in the ebooks is given.  The example is first order consecutive reactions where the rate equations for the the concentration changes are plotted.  By varying the rate constants so that the first is ten times smaller than the second, the steady […]

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