Kinetics Outline

[Megan Singer 3D]

One of the bullet points on the kinetics outline reads:

Know how to determine the order of a reaction, its rate law, and its rate constant for reactions
with more than one reactant.

How is determining the rate law and rate constant for reactions with more than one reactant different than determining the rate law and rate constant for reactions with one reactant?

[Joseph Hsing 2C]

For reactions with more than one reactant, we will have up that many ratios of rates in order to find the order of each reactant.

[Katherine_Douglas_1F]

This is related to the problems where they give you experimental trials of data with, say three, reactants. For these problems, you have to determine the order of each individual reactant. You do this by taking the ratio of two trials and comparing the ratio of the reactant in question to the ratio of the calculated rates. Once you do this for each reactant, you can determine the overall reaction order by summing the order of all the reactants.

[Valerie Doan 3I]

For more than one reactant, you would have to utilize the pseudo rate law approach, unless they gave you a table of all the rate laws and initial concentrations. For example if you have rxn A + B + C --> 2D, the rate law would be rate=k[A]^n [B]^m [C]^l and using the pseudo rate law approach you would do these following steps in order to get a pseudo first order reaction and determine the order of each reactant
1. make [A] very small and [B] and [C] large to determine n
2. make [B] very small and [A] and [C] large to determine m
3. make [C] very small and [B] and [A] large to determine l