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Chemistry Forums for Students => Organic Chemistry Forum => Topic started by: jelly_jelly on March 03, 2005, 03:29:21 AM

Title: To 'MOVIES': HELP with basic hydrolysis of ester!!
Post by: jelly_jelly on March 03, 2005, 03:29:21 AM
I am trying to find out the order of the reaction; then the rate constant; and the activation energy of the reaction. Do you have any suggestions??? Thank you so so much!!!  ;D
Title: Re:To 'MOVIES': HELP with basic hydrolysis of ester!!
Post by: movies on March 03, 2005, 01:54:03 PM
I'm not the best person to ask about kinetics.

To figure out the order of the reaction you can vary the ratios of the starting materials and observe the rate of reaction by checking the conversion/yield at several particular times during the reaction.  It's been a long time since I figured out how to tell the order of the reaction from those experiments but I think that you can tell.  For example, if you double the concentration of one of the reactants but the rate increases four fold, then the reaction is second order in that reactant.  If the rate only doubles, then it's first order.

I don't know how to get the rate constant from that data.  I think that it is just a scalar multiplier to the actual concentration part of the equation (which you can figure from the experiments above).

I think you can figure the activation energy from the Arrhenius equation, but I am not sure if that is correct, and I don't even recall what the Arrhenius equation is.  Alas.

I hope this at least gets you started.