Submitted by Maggie Geselbracht / Reed College on Sat, 04/25/2009 - 22:19
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Description

I usually do not take time in my inorganic course to teach students about how to name coordination complexes. And yet, I would like them to know nomenclature to the extent that they can correctly name various complexes in their lab reports or understand the naming conventions used in the literature. Often, there is a section in their textbook that I can refer them to. However, this year, I am using Housecroft and Sharpe, and I could not find the appropriate sections in the text. So, I found some online resources to refer my students to.

The first website listed below is a brief online tutorial outlining the basic rules with examples.

The second link is to the IUPAC Red Book chapter on Coordination Complexes available on Google Books.

Implementation Notes
I provided these two links to my students in the description of their lab report write-up for a multi-week experiment involving Werner complexes. My expectation was that they would learn what they needed to know to name the complexes correctly in their lab reports. I also provided a link to the original JACS reference to linkage isomerism in pentaamminenitritocobalt(III) chloride, which is one of the compounds they made. Several students asked me if they should name this complex according to IUPAC conventions or how it was named in the JACS paper, which was nitritopentamminecobalt(III) chloride. So that tells me that some of them were paying attention!
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Robert Lancashire / UWI, Jamaica

The latest Red Book gives quite different information to what is obtained from the link you provided. Nothing stays the same for long....

chloro is chlorido etc.

Thu, 10/22/2009 - 09:35 Permalink