Abstract
An application for visualizing the dynamic properties of an equimolar binary mixture of isotropic reactive particles is presented. By introducing a user selectable choice for the activation energy,...
Highlights
It is well known that, in spite of their relevance in any chemistry curriculum, concepts related to reaction rates and, more generally, to chemical kinetics are among the most difficult to grasp by students at all levels of instruction
Many fundamental aspects of chemical kinetics, in gas phase reactions, can be and effectively dealt with by applying ideas inspired by the particle model of matter and collision theory.[8−13] For example, for gas phase reactions, while it is probably reasonable for students to accept the idea that reactant molecules must come into contact and be properly oriented in order to react, it is not as straightforward to imagine that not all such collisions lead to reaction
For the reasons discussed in previous work,[18,19] in order to describe and visualize the dynamical behavior of the particle model of matter, rather than use arbitrary animations, in this work a realistic model based on the Molecular Dynamics (MD) method has been adopted
Summary
It is well known that, in spite of their relevance in any chemistry curriculum, concepts related to reaction rates and, more generally, to chemical kinetics are among the most difficult to grasp by students at all levels of instruction. In the simple case of gas phase reactions, the collision theory[8−12,20,22] provides an interpretation of Arrhenius’ law by identifying the parameter Z as a slightly temperature dependent collision frequency and Ea as the minimum collision energy required for a reactive encounter. For reactions in condensed phases, the above discussion, on the basis of occasional binary collisions of otherwise freely moving molecules, does not apply
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