Question

(a) Define order of reaction. (b) Rates of reaction double with every 10º rise in temperature. If this

Answer 1

While high school chemistry teaches us some 'rules of thumb' such as the rate of a reaction doubles for every 100C raise in temperature, we should be able to see from the expression above that this heuristic is really only valid at some specific activation energy at some specific temperature. In reality, activation energies vary over a large range of values and therefore this is not something particularly useful. However, knowing the value of activation energy for a specific reaction should enable us to make predictions about how the rate varies with temperature fairly easily.