Jump to content

Tartaglia

Senior Members
  • Posts

    240
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by Tartaglia

  1. Well you can determine the electrostatic attraction/repulsion part of the lattice energy due to point charges (this involves a constant called the Madelung constant), though not the repulsion due to overlapping electron clouds. The solvation energy is largely a function of the polarising power of the ions, which is determined by charge density. There are also obviously entropy considerations

  2. Organic chemistry is largely slog. If you learn the basics well then you will do very well, if you don't come to terms with the basics you will do badly. It does not suffer the conceptual difficulties that say theoretical chemistry has.

  3. Well aqua regia will certainly work, but I expect it is a "sledge hammer to crack a nut" approach. The NO3- is non coordinating and nitrate salts are often far more soluble than chlorides, so it may be less of a problem than first appears.

    I suspect the oxidation is a kinetic problem rather than a thermodynamic problem, but tbh NiCl26H2O is so cheap I would just buy a little bit!

  4. Well, acetyl chloride could be used, but I expect you don't have that either. Also as this is a typical A level prep and your knowledge of chemistry seems limited, the use of acetyl chloride is far more risky than acetic anhydride

    The problem with this prep is that the phenolic oxygen lone pair is not very nucleophilic so the usual ester prep from the alcohol and carboxylic acid will not work.

  5. Treating Co2(CO)8 with OH- in thf gives Co(CO)4- anion which can be protonated to give HCo(CO)4, which I believe is relatively unstable. Don't protonate it in thf though you'll polymerise the solvent.

    Co(CO)3H is a 16e transient species, which is probably in eqm with the 18e HCo(CO)4. Cobalt carbonyls are notoriously labile

  6. I would look to see if there are any chiral 3,4 dihydroxy amphetamine like natural products available and then you won't have to resolve but can build the methylene five membered ring in after

     

    By the way, I expect this post will get some attention from the moderators - for my penny's worth, you look too credible to be doing something dodgy!

  7. It is really the solubility of the base (NaOH, but it would be better to use a stronger one) which thf will increase. Thf is a coordinating solvent and will bind to Na+/K+.It is also not an electrophile and so will not undergo substitution reactions which CH2Cl2 can.

     

    I think bearing in mind you must use a stoichiometric amount of base, I would simply use a standard procedure, which presumably you can look up.

     

    A long shot here - you aren't doing this for Mike Turner at Manchester are you?

  8. It is perfectly possible to become a good chemist without being a good mathematician, but in my experience, it is not the way to put the odds in your favour. You'll be selected out of physical and theoretical cheimstry for a start. Even inorganic chemists (which is what I first trained as) often require good maths. There wasn't a day during my PhD when I didn't use group theory as I did a lot of spectroscopy. The physical organic chemistry can also be pretty mathematical, so immediately you get narrowed down to organic synthetic, some aspects of inorganic and possibly some biochemical type disciplines

  9. In most chemistry courses Schroedinger's equation will be introduced in the 2nd year so if you can't handle second order partial differential equations then you are at a distinct disadvantage.

    I would also echo the above post on the importance of group theory which is crucial in spectroscopy and in molecular orbital theory and is imo generally poorly understood by many chemists. (You only have to look at how little symmetry is discussed on this forum.)

    I always recommend anyone wishing to study chemistry improve their mathematical skills to well above A level

  10. I do remember a PhD student "accidentally" pressing sodium wire into CHCl3 to dry it when I was postdocing in Germany. When his supervisor found out, they got a robot type thing to drop the choroform bottles out of the lab window after having cleared three or four floors of laboratories. All extremely embarassing for the people involved.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.