With funding from the Organic Dynamics Program Professor Bordwell of Northwestern University will measure bond dissociation enthalpies (BDE) for the cleavage of weak acids, HA, by combining the oxidation potentials of the conjugate anions, A-, with the negative logarithm of the acidity constant of the acid in dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). Fundamental thermodynamic parameters, vital to computational methods and to molecular modeling studies, will be obtained for complex compounds for which extrapolated values of BDE from other data are unreliable. This project will measure by a method using compounds dissolved in liquids and different from standard methods that require gas phase studies, the energy required to break selected bonds in carbon containing molecules. This contribution is vital to current efforts to model by computer computations the chemical reactions and physical properties of complex carbon containing compounds.
