Recent content by BrianC12

I noticed in my book, some reactions have a steric factor greater than 1. How is this possible? I thought reactions were collision limited and orientation can only limit reaction rate.

But even if you don't have enough of one type of reagent, it's sort of intuitive that the resulting change in enthalpy would just be a fraction of the number of moles that reacted, which wouldn't make Hess's Law wrong...right?

Alright thanks for clearing that up! Btw LCKurtz, I like your sig haha, that's so true.

If what I said above is right, then I'm guessing the professor meant why is Hess's Law not obeyed in real world examples where conditions and paths can vary. I feel like he should have included that in the question though...oh well. If what I said isn't right then I wouldn't know under what...

Ahh alright that makes sense, thanks. I actually checked with my friend's midterm. He wrote "this is not an elementary reaction because elementary reactions are characterized by collisions with other molecules"(that's the definition in the book) and got full credit. I don't really understand how...

That enthalpy is a state function and when chemical reactions are added, their enthalpies must be added as well. Is the answer the fact that it only accounts for the energy in the chemical bonds and not the heat or work exchanged with the surroundings?

Ok I'm just confused now. The second part of the question asked to write the differential rate law. I wrote -d[A]/dt = k[A]^0 = k and got full credit. If this isn't an elementary reaction then I wouldn't be able to write the rate law. But according to the TA who graded my test, there are...

So that would mean this is NOT an elementary reaction because the coefficient of 1 for A doesn't match the power of 0 for the equilibrium equation? But if that's true, then doesn't that imply that any zero order reaction isn't an elementary reaction since a coefficient > 0 can obviously never...

How can you tell whether a reaction is an elementary reaction without knowing the reaction mechanism? I had this question on a recent midterm and got it wrong: A -> Product Is this an elementary reaction? I said yes because it has no intermediates. In retrospect there's no way I could...

Well I see that they used <-fx, -fy, 1>, but yea I'm still not seeing what happened to the magnitude. And yes I'm using Stewarts.

A particle moves along line segments from the origin to the points (1,0,0),(1,2,1),(0,2,1) and back to the origin under the influence of the force field F = <z^2, 2xy, 4y^2>, find the work done. Cramster and the textbook used the normal vector <0, -1/2, 1> which, if I'm not mistaken, isn't a...

Ahh alright that makes sense, thanks.

If you have a coil with its magnetic dipole moment perpendicular to a uniform magnetic field, μ × B says that there will be maximum torque since sin90 is 1. But at the same time, -μ dot B gives the potential energy and cos90 is 0. What I don't understand is how you can have torque at this angle...

mmm nope there's no extra factor that they took out based on the work. Is it possible that the book and cramster are just wrong? And either way thanks, just wanted to clarify.

I kept getting a homework problem wrong and I couldn't figure out why until I looked at the normal vector that the book answer used, which turned out to not be the unit normal. I checked cramster and they used the same vector as the book. They both used <0, -1/2, 1>