Core carbon atoms the relevance of metal carbides

8 Core carbon atoms the relevance of metal carbides 

We noted in our discussion of rhenium and rhodium carbonyl clusters the importance of systems containing core atoms, particularly core carbon atoms that often feature in metal carbonyl clusters prepared by thermal decomposition of other clusters, when they result from reactions between pairs of carbonyl ligands that involve transfer of one oxygen atom from one carbon atom to the other, leading to 

In the absence of experimental thermochemical evidence about the strength of the metal-carbon bonds in metal carbonyl carbide systems, we can turn to the binary compounds formed between transition metals and carbon for information about the last point, the strength of metal-carbon bonds to core carbon atoms. Transition metal carbides are important. They include, in substances such as tungsten carbide, WC, some of the hardest substances known, and the capacity of added carbon to toughen metals has been known since the earliest days of steel-making. Information about them is, however, patchy. They are difficult to prepare in stoichiometric compositions of established structure and thermochemistry the metals we are most interested in here (osmium, rhenium, and rhodium) are not known to form thermodynamically stable binary phases MC and the carbides of some other metals adopt very complicated structures. Enough is, however, known about the simple structures of the carbides of the early transition metals to provide some useful pointers. 

These observations on the structurally simple carbides of the early transition metals show how the strength of binding of core carbon atoms in molecular metal carbonyl clusters can in principle be estimated by comparison with metal carbides for which structural and theoretical data are available, and leads us to hope that examination of the wider body of transition metal carbides will provide relationships between the length and strength of bonds between metal atoms and octahe-drally coordinated carbon atoms that can be applied to specific molecular metal carbonyl clusters containing core carbon atoms. 

---