Posts Tagged ‘Carbon’
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018
Following the general recognition of carbon as being tetrahedrally tetravalent in 1869 (Paterno) and 1874 (Van’t Hoff and Le Bell), an early seminal exploitation of this to the conformation of cyclohexane was by Hermann Sachse in 1890.[cite]10.1002/cber.189002301216 [/cite] This was verified when the Braggs in 1913[cite]10.1098/rspa.1913.0084[/cite], followed by an oft-cited article by Mohr in 1918,[cite]10.1002/prac.19180980123[/cite] established the crystal structure of diamond as comprising repeating rings in the chair conformation.† So by 1926, you might imagine that the shape (or conformation as we would now call it) of cyclohexane would be well-known. No quite so for everyone!
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Tags:Carbon, chair, Chemistry, Conformation, Cycloalkanes, cyclohexane, Cyclohexane conformation, Derek Barton, Hermann Sachse, Hoff, Imperial College Chemical Society, Isomerism, Physical organic chemistry, R. F Hunter, Stereochemistry, Van 't Hof
Posted in Interesting chemistry | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 6th, 2017
Mention carbon dioxide (CO2) to most chemists and its properties as a metal ligand are not the first aspect that springs to mind. Here thought I might take a look at how it might act as such.
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Tags:Carbon, Carbon Capture & Storage, carbon dioxide, chemical bonding, Chemistry, Environment, Ligand, ligand-metal coordination, metal, metal ligand, Propellants, Search queries, search query, short metal-centroid distance
Posted in crystal_structure_mining | 2 Comments »
Thursday, April 13th, 2017
Layer stacking in structures such as graphite is well-studied. The separation between the π-π planes is ~3.35Å, which is close to twice the estimated van der Waals (vdW) radius of carbon (1.7Å). But how much closer could such layers get, given that many other types of relatively weak interaction such as hydrogen bonding can contract the vdW distance sum by up to ~0.8Å or even more? This question was prompted by the separation calculated for the ion-pair cyclopropenium cyclopentadienide (~2.6-2.8Å).
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Tags:Carbon, chemical bonding, Chemistry, Cyclopentadienyl anion, Graphite, Hydrogen bond, Intermolecular forces, Nature, Organic chemistry, search query, Stacking, Supramolecular chemistry, VDW
Posted in crystal_structure_mining | 1 Comment »
Friday, March 31st, 2017
Nowadays, data supporting most publications relating to the synthesis of organic compounds is more likely than not to be found in associated “supporting information” rather than the (often page limited) article itself. For example, this article[cite]10.1021/jacs.6b13229[/cite] has an SI which is paginated at 907; almost a mini-database in its own right!† Here I ponder whether such dissemination of data is FAIR (Findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable).[cite]10.1038/sdata.2016.18[/cite]
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Tags:Carbon, chemical databases, chemical graveyard, chemical spectra, Chemistry, digital signature, Nature, Organic, Organic chemistry, Organic compound, Organic food, search engines, Technology/Internet
Posted in Chemical IT | 3 Comments »
Saturday, July 25th, 2015
I recently followed this bloggers trail; link1 → link2 to arrive at this delightful short commentary on atom-atom bonds in crystals[cite]10.1107/S2052252515002006[/cite] by Jack Dunitz. Here he discusses that age-old question (to chemists), what is a bond? Even almost 100 years after Gilbert Lewis’ famous analysis,[cite]10.1021/ja02261a002[/cite] we continue to ponder this question. Indeed, quite a debate on this topic broke out in a recent post here. My eye was caught by one example in Jack's article: "The close stacking of planar anions, as occurs in salts of croconic acid …far from producing a lowering of the crystal energy, this stacking interaction in itself leads to an increase by several thousand kJ mol−1 arising from Coulombic repulsion between the doubly negatively charged anions" I thought I might explore this point a bit further in this post.
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Tags:Carbon, Cations, Chemical bond, control search, Croconic acid, crystal energy, crystal structure search, Gilbert Lewis, intermolecular search, Jack Dunitz, overall energy balance, Proton
Posted in Chemical IT, crystal_structure_mining, Interesting chemistry | 1 Comment »
Sunday, April 26th, 2015
Allotropes are differing structural forms of the elements. The best known example is that of carbon, which comes as diamond and graphite, along with the relatively recently discovered fullerenes and now graphenes. Here I ponder whether any of the halogens can have allotropes.
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Tags:Allotropy, Bromine, Carbon, Chemical elements, Chemistry, free energy barrier, Fullerene, Halogen, Hypobromite, Matter, Nonmetals, Oxidizing agents, Oxygen, pence
Posted in reaction mechanism | 9 Comments »