Week 5: Coordination Chemistry 1 Overview Getting Started Techniques Procedure FAQ Full Lab Manual Introduction & Goals Chemistry & Background Key Questions Prelab Problems Safety Procedure In Your Write-up Experiments Index ChemLab Home		Goals In this four-week experiment you will synthesize a compound and purify it in week 1. In week 2 you will assay it for purity by colorimetric analysis and by gravimetric analysis. In week 3, you will analyze your compound by titration of its acidity. Finally, in weeks 3 and 4 your will explore the mechanism and kinetics of a chemical reaction of your compound. To Learn or Review Transition Metal Complexes Zumdahl, pp. 910-917 Recrystalization Zumdahl, pp. 923-928 Introduction Most of the familiar metallic elements are transition metals, a large block of elements which occupies the central region of the periodic table. Iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, silver, tungsten, gold, and platinum are familiar examples of transition metals. A characteristic property of these elements is the relatively low reactivity of the parent metals and their alloys. For this reason, in combination with their attractive physical properties, they are useful as structural materials. Despite their considerable chemical inertness the transition metals can be oxidized, and only the more unreactive of them--copper, silver, gold, and platinum--occur appreciably in nature as the native metals. The rest are found exclusively in minerals containing the oxidized element, often as an oxide, sulfide, or carbonate (e.g. Fe2O3, NiS, FeCO3). Since most of these minerals are insoluble in water, transition metal cations are present in natural water systems only at very low concentrations. For instance, the abundance of iron in the earth's crust is 4.7% by weight compared to 2.6% for sodium. In sea water, however, sodium is more abundant than iron by a factor of 2 x 106.
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