Inorganic reactions and their mechanisms

Inorganic chemists, are interested in chemical reactions as well as the static properties of substances. The measurement of thermodynamic quantities for chemical reactions will not concern us, although we will make extensive use of the experimental results elsewhere in this book. In Chapter 9 we will look in more detail at inorganic reactions and their mechanisms blow-by-blow accounts of what actually happens at the atomic level as the reaction proceeds. Some of the spectroscopic methods described in this chapter are important in mechanistic studies they may be used to follow the rate of a reaction or to identify short-lived intermediates. Other techniques (such as isotopic labelling) are useful in the determination of reaction mechanisms. 

The structure of a reacting molecule can be used as the chemical probe for the reaction mechanism in several ways. Ample experience is available with these methods from the research of noncatalytic homogeneous reactions, and their possibilities and limitations are well known. However, the solid catalyst restricts the scope to some extent on the one hand, but opens new applications on the other. For this reason, the methods of physical organic and inorganic chemistry developed for noncatalytic reactions cannot simply be transferred into the field of heterogeneous catalysis. The following remarks should identify some of the problems. 

The interaction between experiment and theory is very important in the field of chemical transformations. In 1981 Kenichi Fukui and Roald Hoffmann received a Nobel Prize for their theoretical work on the electronic basis of reaction mechanisms for a number of important reaction types. Theory has also been influential in guiding experimental work toward demonstrating the mechanisms of one of the simplest classes of reactions, electron transfer (movement of an electron from one place to another). Henry Taube received a Nobel prize in 1983 for his studies of electron transfer in inorganic chemistry, and Rudolf Marcus received a Nobel Prize in 1992 for his theoretical work in this area. The state of development of chemical reaction theory is now sufficiently advanced that it can begin to guide the invention of new transformations by synthetic chemists. 

Quantum chemical methods are well established, accepted and of high potential for investigation of inorganic reaction mechanisms, especially if they can be applied as a fruitful interplay between theory and experiment. In the case of solvent exchange reactions their major deficiency is the limited possibility of including solvent effects. We demonstrated that with recent DFT-and ab initio methods, reaction mechanisms can be successfully explored. To obtain an idea about solvent effects, implicit solvent models can be used in the calculations, when their limitations are kept in mind. In future, more powerful computers will be available and will allow more sophisticated calculations to be performed. This will enable scientists to treat solvent molecules explicitly by ab initio molecular dynamics (e.g., Car-Parrinello simulations). The application of such methods will in turn complement the quantum chemical toolbox for the exploration of solvent and ligand exchange reactions. 

In the gas and liquid phases, very well-established CL reactions exist that have been chronologically introduced in Chapter 1, together with their mechanisms they will be treated in different chapters of this book. Particularly, some chapters include descriptions of the CL systems and applications in the liquid phase in organic and inorganic analysis (Chapters 5 and 6, respectively), for BL systems (Chapter 10) applications derived from the use of organized media (Chapter 11) the specific study of the mechanism and applications of a widely applied CL system based on the reaction of peroxyoxalates (Chapter 7) kinetics... 

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