Reversible Reactions and Chemical Equilibrium

Because catalysts are used by the chemical industry to produce many essential products, the discovery of new and better catalysts is important for meeting the goals of Green Chemistry (Special Topic 1.1 Green Chemistry) 

As catalysts improve, less energy will be required for the production of industtial chemicals, and raw material and by-products will become more benign. 

Biocatalysts—catalysts produced by living organisms—are another important category of new 

Our next step in understanding chemical change is to apply what we have learned about rates of reactions to explore what happens when a reaction is reversible. Let s take a look at a real world example that we can use to illustrate our main points. 

Let s say you become so interested in chemistry that you decide to train to be an industrial chemist. Your first professional assignment is to design a procedure for making hydrogen gas that will then be used to make ammonia for fertilizers. 

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Reversible reactions and chemical equilibrium When a reaction results in an almost complete conversion of reactants to products, chemists say that the reaction goes to completion—but most reactions do not go to completion. The reactions appear to stop because they are reversible. A reversible reaction is a chemical reaction that can occur in both the forward and the reverse directions. 

To explain these conceptual problems, Bergquist Heikkinen (1990) have suggested that these are related to the content of chemistry courses. As discussed in the previous subsection, the concepts of reversible reactions and chemical equilibrium are at odds with conceptions of chemical reactions which are normally discussed earlier in the syllabus (see Table 1). 

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