Electron counting exercise motivated by a recent paper (J. Am. Chem.
In this literature discussion, students read an Inorganic Chemistry paper (doi: 10.1021/ic503062w) about diarylamido-based PNZ pincer ligands and their Ni, Pd, and Rh complexes. Specifically, this paper uses IR and E1/2 potentials to demonstrate that the redox events occur not on the metal center but on the pincer ligands.
This is an overview of some important principles of ligand design. Topics covered include HSAB theory, the chelate effect, the chelate ring size effect, the macrocyclic effect, the cryptate effect, and steric focus in ligand design.
The Committee on Professional Training (CPT) has restructured accreditation of Chemistry-related degrees, removing the old model of one year each of General, Analytical, Organic, and Physical Chemistry plus other relevant advanced classes as designed by the individual department. The new model (2008) requires one semester each in the five Foundation areas: Analytical, Inorganic, Organic, Biochemistry and Physical Chemistry, leaving General Chemistry as an option, with the development of advanced classes up to the individual departments.
This learning object is aimed at getting students to think critically about the data they collect in lab as they collect the data similar to how chemists typically conduct research. They will be given a pre-lab video and a procedure prior to lab, conduct the experiment, and then upload their data to an Excel spreadsheet. Students will then stay in their group to discuss the questions given to them on the worksheet in class with the instructor, and are allowed to continue working on them as a group up until the due date.
chapter 1 of George Stanley's Organometallics course: Introduction, Orbitals, Electron counting
This chapter is an overview of the field, with an emphasis on electron counting
The powerpoint slides contain answers to some of the in-class exercises, so those are behind the "faculty only" wall. I shares these with students after the class, but not before.
everyone is more than welcome to edit the materials to suit their own uses, and I would appreciate being notified of any mistakes that are found.
This literature discussion focuses on a paper from the Angelici lab that examines the heat of protonation of [CpʹIr(PR3)(CO)] compounds. The compounds presented in the paper provide good introductory examples for electron counting in organometallic compounds. The single carbonyl ligand in these compounds provide an excellent probe to monitor the electron richness at the metal center which is impacted by the electron donor ability of the ligands.
Students work in groups to derive the ligand-field diagram for a square-pyramidal vanadium(III) oxo complex using octahedral V(III) as a starting point. The activity helps students to correlate changes in orbital energies as a function of changing ligands and geometry as well as rationalizing why certain geometries can be particularly good (or bad) for particular complexes. The activity also helps students see why oxo complexes of early metals are frequently best described as triple bonds.
This list includes a number of LOs to help in teaching nanomaterials subjects; however, it is not exhaustive.
Updated June 2018.
This is a resource that has short, animated tutorials on a variety of different topics. Most of the topics are materials science and/or engineering topics but there are several that would be of interest to chemistry students. (A full list of topics is given below.)