The Role of Solvent

Fundamentally, the solvent can influence crystal structure, crystal size, morphology, and purity by modifying solution properties (i.e., density, viscosity, and component diffusivities), solute solubility, as well as the structure of the crystal-liquid interface. The influence of the solvent on the first three factors are well known especially morphology (e.g., Srinivisan et al. 2000 Maruyuma et al. 2000 Wang et al. 1999 Walker 1997 Khoshkhoo et al. 1996 Blagden et al. 1998 Roberts et al. 1994 Geertman et al. 1992 Docherty et al. 1991 Shimon et al. 1990 van der Voort et al. 1990). The solvent properties affecting heat and mass transport 

For growth from solution, the analysis becomes somewhat more complex because solute-solvent interactions play a role in the growth process. For growth from solution, the molar heat of fusion is replaced by the enthalpy of dissolution, and the 

If it is assumed that the process of dissolution is thermodynamically equivalent to a process of melting followed by mixing of the melt with the saturated solution, then the following expression holds (Jetten et al. 1984) 

One of the most important results of theoretical investigations of crystal growth has been the quantification of the effect of solvents on crystal interface structure. In particular, a key parameter, called the a-factor, has been developed from fundamental theories that allows identification of likely growth mechanisms based only on solute and solution properties. 

The surface entropy factor, a, can be considered a relative measure of the degree of smoothness of a crystal face on the atomic level. In Section 3.9.3 it is shown how a correlates the effect of solvents on both growth rate and growth mechanism. 

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A logical division is made for the adsorption of nonelectrolytes according to whether they are in dilute or concentrated solution. In dilute solutions, the treatment is very similar to that for gas adsorption, whereas in concentrated binary mixtures the role of the solvent becomes more explicit. An important class of adsorbed materials, self-assembling monolayers, are briefly reviewed along with an overview of the essential features of polymer adsorption. The adsorption of electrolytes is treated briefly, mainly in terms of the exchange of components in an electrical double layer. 

For this scheme we again obtain Eq. (5-58), because the water (solvent) concentration is essentially constant and so is absorbed into the rate constant. Thus, the rds is bimolecular, but the rate equation is first-order the role of the solvent in the transition state is not evident from the rate equation. 

The ortho effect may consist of several components. The normal electronic effect may receive contributions from inductive and resonance factors, just as with tneta and para substituents. There may also be a proximity or field electronic effect that operates directly between the substituent and the reaction site. In addition there may exist a true steric effect, as a result of the space-filling nature of the substituent (itself ultimately an electronic effect). Finally it is possible that non-covalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonding or charge transfer, may take place. The role of the solvent in both the initial state and the transition state may be different in the presence of ortho substitution. Many attempts have been made to separate these several effects. For example. Farthing and Nam defined an ortho substituent constant in the usual way by = log (K/K ) for the ionization of benzoic acids, postulating that includes both electronic and steric components. They assumed that the electronic portion of the ortho effect is identical to the para effect, writing CTe = o-p, and that the steric component is equal to the difference between the total effect and the electronic effect, or cts = cr — cte- They then used a multiple LFER to correlate data for orrAo-substituted reactants. 

Other measures of nucleophilicity have been proposed. Brauman et al. studied Sn2 reactions in the gas phase and applied Marcus theory to obtain the intrinsic barriers of identity reactions. These quantities were interpreted as intrinsic nucleo-philicities. Streitwieser has shown that the reactivity of anionic nucleophiles toward methyl iodide in dimethylformamide (DMF) is correlated with the overall heat of reaction in the gas phase he concludes that bond strength and electron affinity are the important factors controlling nucleophilicity. The dominant role of the solvent in controlling nucleophilicity was shown by Parker, who found solvent effects on nucleophilic reactivity of many orders of magnitude. For example, most anions are more nucleophilic in DMF than in methanol by factors as large as 10, because they are less effectively shielded by solvation in the aprotic solvent. Liotta et al. have measured rates of substitution by anionic nucleophiles in acetonitrile solution containing a crown ether, which forms an inclusion complex with the cation (K ) of the nucleophile. These rates correlate with gas phase rates of the same nucleophiles, which, in this crown ether-acetonitrile system, are considered to be naked anions. The solvation of anionic nucleophiles is treated in Section 8.3. 

Pertiaps the most obvious experiment is to compare the rate of a reaction in the presence of a solvent and in the absence of the solvent (i.e., in the gas phase). This has long been possible for reactions proceeding homolytically, in which little charge separation occurs in the transition state for such reactions the rates in the gas phase and in the solution phase are similar. Very recently it has become possible to examine polar reactions in the gas phase, and the outcome is greatly different, with the gas-phase reactivity being as much as 10 greater than the reactivity in polar solvents. This reduced reactivity in solvents is ascribed to inhibition by solvation in such reactions the role of the solvent clearly overwhelms the intrinsic reactivity of the reactants. Gas-phase kinetic studies are a powerful means for interpreting the reaction coordinate at a molecular level. 

Coordination chemistry of certain transition metal ions the role of the solvent. V. Gutmann, Coord. Chem. Rev., 1967, 2,239-256 (39). 

In this section it is intended to discuss the role of the solvent, the base electrolyte and the other reagents which are themselves not electroactive but which are added to vary the pH of the medium, to trap reaction intermediates or to vary the activity of the substrate, an intermediate or the product. It would seem correct, however, to discuss the various... 

As of now no details of the synthesis of optically active tritiated compounds produced under microwave-enhanced conditions have been published. Another area of considerable interest would be the study of solvent effects on the hydrogenation of aromatic compounds using noble-metal catalysts as considerable data on the thermal reactions is available [52]. Comparison between the microwave and thermal results could then provide useful information on the role of the solvent, not readily available by other means. 

In halogenated solvents, catalysis by a second bromine molecule, which assists the Br—Br bond heterolysis, is the main driving force. The role of the solvent is electrostatic, but the absence of an extensive Kirkwood relationship suggests that there is some other kind of contribution (Bellucci et al, 1985b). 

The Role of the Solvent in Polymer Adsorption Displacement and Solvency Effects... 

The role of the solvent in polymer adsorption has been the subject of much discussion. For example, theories have made predictions about the effect of the polymer/solvent interaction (i.e. Flory Huggins x parameter) on adsorption. For many systems, x parameters had already been tabulated so that a number of adsorption studies focused attention on this parameter. In spite of much effort, available data are ambiguous, sometimes verifying and sometimes contradicting the trends predicted by theory. 

Such displacement effects, although often very pronounced, have not yet been studied systematically. They will be the subject of the present paper. We will discuss the adsorption of polymer from a mixture of two solvents and we will see that in some cases drastic effects occur as a function of the mixture composition. Also, we explore some consequences and practical applications of displacement. It turns out that displacement studies not only increase our insight on the role of the solvent in polymer adsorption but can also be used to determine the segmental adsorption energy. So far, experimental data for this quantity were very scarce. Some illustrative experiments will be discussed briefly. 

One of the problems encountered when dealing with the interaction of Lewis acids and bases in a quantitative way is in evaluating the role of the solvent. Bond energies in molecules are values based on the molecule in the gas phase. However, it is not possible to study the interaction of many Lewis acids and bases in the gas phase because the adducts formed are not sufficiently stable to exist at the temperature necessary to convert the reactants to gases. For example, the reaction between pyridine and phenol takes place readily in solution as a result of hydrogen bonding ... 

In classical homogenous catalysis, an organic compound, i.e., a real liquid phase (a solvent) dissolves all of the reactants, catalysts, and products. The role of the solvent is underlined by the fact that it has to be separated from the reaction products by an additional and costly step, for example by distillation. 

A phenomenon that in some cases might tend to conceal the role of the solvent is the tendency for a better solvating medium to change both the activation energy and the activation entropy in such directions as to cancel and give only a minimum effect on the actual rate of the... 

Bertran, J., Gallardo, I., Moreno, M. and Saveant, J. M. Dissociative electron transfer. Ab initio study of the carbon-halogen bond reductive cleavage in methyl and perfluoromethyl halides. Role of the solvent, JAm.Chem.Soc., 114 (1992), 9576-9583... 

Polymerisations of undiluted, bulk monomer are rare except for those initiated by ionising radiations and they require a special treatment which will be given later. The most common situation is to have the propagating ions in a mixture of monomer and solvent, and as the solvation by the solvent is ubiquitous and may dominate over that by other components of the reaction mixture, mainly because of the mass-action effect, it will not be noted by any special symbol, except in a few instances. This means that we adopt the convention that the symbol Pn+ denotes a growing cation solvated mainly by the solvent correspondingly kp+ denotes the propagation constant of this species, subject to the proviso at the end of Section 2.3. Its relative abundance depends upon the abundance of the various other species in which the role of the solvent as the primary solvator has been taken over by any or all of the anion or the monomer or the polymer. The extent to which this happens depends on the ionic strength (essentially the concentration of the ions), and the polarity of the solvent, the monomer and the polymer, and their concentrations. 

The role of the solvent as modulator of interactions between caged ion-radical pairs was discussed in Section 3.3.3. A more general problem is... 

The major difficulty in predicting the viscosity of these systems is due to the interplay between hydrodynamics, the colloid pair interaction energy and the particle microstructure. Whilst predictions for atomic fluids exist for the contribution of the microstructural properties of the system to the rheology, they obviously will not take account of the role of the solvent medium in colloidal systems. Many of these models depend upon the notion that the applied shear field distorts the local microstructure. The mathematical consequence of this is that they rely on the rate of change of the pair distribution function with distance over longer length scales than is the case for the shear modulus. Thus... 

Kinetic and equilibrium acidities of several families of nitroalkanes have been discussed extensively in the chapter by Lewis172, where the effects of changing substituents and the nature of the base, together with the role of the solvent on rates of ionization and equilibria, have been considered. 

Methods Used to Study Properties of the Metal/Solution Interface Role of the Solvent and the Metal... 

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