Gray Matter: Want a Chemical Reaction Without Heat?

Add a Catalyst

How does this copper earring glow without any flame or current?
By Theodore GrayPosted 04.18.2012 at 10:13 am11 Comments

Butterfly Effect
Copper facilitates a reaction between oxygen and
causing an earring to continuously glow red-hot
an external heat source.

acetone,
even without

The copper earring you see here had already been

bright orange for half an hour when we took the
There is no flame under it, no electric current
Underneath is a pool of volatile and highly
acetone, but the liquid is not on fire. So where is the
from?

glowing
photograph.
through it.
flammable
heat coming

Acetone vapor and oxygen from the air are

combining
and releasing heat on the surface of the copper, at a
much lower
temperature than acetone
normally burns (but still hot enough to make the
earring glow). The copper provides a sort of
backdoor that
overcomes the resistance (called the activation
energy) that
normally prevents acetone from reacting, except at higher temperatures.
Copper enables the reaction, but it is not consumed by it. (The earring can keep doing this indefinitely
without being used up.) That property defines what it means to be a catalyst.
The most familiar examples of catalysts are the catalytic converters in cars, which finish the
incomplete combustion of gasoline using platinum or palladium. Catalysts are important long before
the gas makes it to the car, too. Platinum and rhenium are used to reform crude oil: to rearrange
hydrocarbons into the specific molecules that make up gasoline.
Catalysts greatly reduce the energy, time and complexity of equipment required to do the reforming,
and thus make the process far more efficient. In this sense, catalysis can be very green, which seems
ironic when describing anything about the petroleum industry. In fact, catalysts can reduce energy
use in a wide range of other large-scale chemical manufacturing processes as well.
I like the commonly used slogan a catalyst for change because its a rare example of a phrase that
is scientifically perfect. It describes an organization that makes things happen while continuing
unchanged in its mission. That, in simple terms, is exactly what catalysts do.

1a. How does this demonstration display the properties of a heterogenous catalyst? (page 608-609)
1b. What are the four steps to a heterogenous catalyst? (page 609)
2a. Is there a way to prove that copper was a catalyst in this reaction and neither a reactant or
product?

2b. Provide data that supports the idea that copper is a catalyst.
3a. Oxygen will attack the most electropositive carbon on acetone. Identify the most electropositive
carbon in an acetone chain?
3b. Which methyl group (CH3) on the acetone chain will be replaced?
4. The Third European Combustion Meeting of 2007 (I did not know such an organization existed
myself; but people amuse themselves in all different ways.) described the reaction mechanism and
the intermediates when acetone combusts. See if you can match up the four steps from question 1b
and the intermediates, reactants and products described in the following paper.
http://www.combustion.org.uk/ECM_2007/ecm2007_papers/1-20.pdf

5. Look up Gibbs free energy values for this reaction and determine theoretically the Free Energy
change.
6. Every group starts with 50.0 mL of acetone. Notice I measured to the 0.1mL.
Table 1 lets their reaction continue for three minute
Table 2 lets their reaction continue for six minutes
Table 3 lets their reaction continue for nine minutes
And we are going to do this for all nine tables.
Would it be possible to determine: a) the rate law? Or b) the order of the reaction?
In order to determine what order reaction it is, you would have to change the [acetone].
Acetone is soluble in water but it may have either a positive or negative deviation from Raoults Law.