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EnvE231 Topics

Text: T.W. Swaddle Inorganic Chemistry, Academic Press

Instructor: C. Chieh, Office C2-263, Tel. 888-4567-5816; cchieh@uwaterloo.ca

Introduction to inorganic chemistry - chemical elements
Chemical energetics -
- Chemical reactions - kinetics and thermodynamics
- Chemical equilibrium - mass action law and activity
- Electrolyte solutions - activity and Debye-Huckel equation
- Equilibrium and energy - Gibb's free energy
- Temperature and pressure effects on equilibrium
- Chemical Kinetics - rate laws, mechanisms
- Temperature effect on rate - activation energy
- Ionization potential
- Electron affinity
- Electronegativity
- Bondenergy
- Lattice energy
- Hard and soft acids and bases (HSAB)
- Explosive reactions
Catenation: Inorganic macromolecules
- Factors affecting catenation
- Quantum Theory and Atomic orbitals (suplemented)
- Hybrid orbitals and chemical bonding (suplemented, not in text)
- Chemistry of carbon - diamond, graphite, fullerings, and organic compounds
- Structures of silicon, germanium, zinc blende, wurtzite, and ice
- Structures of silicates (to be discussed later)
- Structures Boron nitrides
- Structures of various phases of sulfur - bonding of sulfur
Crystalline Solids
- X-rays - properties
- Bonding in solides - bridging chemical-bond and solid-state view
- Close packing of spheres - modeling structures of crystalling solids
  the face centered closest packing (fcc, or cubic close packing ccp)
  the hexagonal closest packing (hcp)
  octahedral and terahedral sites
- Three basic structures of metals - fcc, hcp, body centered cubic (bcc)
- Complicate sequence of close packing (structures of rare earth metals)
- Inorganic solids - the NaCl, NiAs, CaF₂, zinc blende, and wurtzite structures
- Radius ratio rules
- Perovskites, and spinels (self study or reading)
- Lattice energy using Born-Haber cycle
Defect solids
- Driving forces of defects - Gibb's energy and entropy
- Point, line, and surface defects - edfinition and explanation
- Effects of impurity on properties - semiconductors and silicon dopping
- Nonstoichiometric compounds - solids with vacancies
- Mechanism of metal scaling
Inorganic solids as heterogeneous catalysts
- Physisorption versus chemisorption
- Guidlines for transition metals as catalysts
- Using defect (non-stoichiometric) oxides and sulfides as catalysts
- Using stoichiometric oxides as catalysts
- Photocatalytic reactions
Silicates and aluminates
- Fundamental units SiO₄ and AlO₄.
- Silicates
- Aluminosilicates
- Zeolites
- Clays
The Atmosphere and gases
- The atmosphere
- The carbon cycle
- Carbon oxides
  - Supercritical carbon dioxide
  - Greenhouse effect
  - Bonding of CO and CO₂
  - Bonding of CO and metals
- Ozone and oxygen
  - Chlorofluorohydrocarbons (CFCs)
  - Depletion of ozone
  - Ozone as a pollutant
- Nitrogen oxides
Chemical bonding
- Lewis dot structures and octet rule
- Valence bond approach to chemical bonding
- Molecular orbital approach to chemical bonding
Ions in solution and complexes (Chapter 13)

Water conditioning (Chapter 14)
Oxidation and reduction (Chapter 15)