Collision frequency describes the rate of collisions between two atomic or molecular species in a given volume, per unit time. In an ideal gas, assuming that the species behave like hard spheres, the collision frequency between entities of species A and species B is:[1]
which has units of [volume][time]−1.
Here,
- is the number of A molecules in the gas,
- is the number of B molecules in the gas,
- is the collision cross section, the "effective area" seen by two colliding molecules, simplified to , where the radius of A and the radius of B.
- is the Boltzmann constant,
- is the temperature,
- is the reduced mass of the reactants A and B,
Collision in diluted solution
In the case of equal-size particles at a concentration in a solution of viscosity , an expression for collision frequency where is the volume in question, and is the number of collisions per second, can be written as:[2]
Where:
- is the Boltzmann constant
- is the absolute temperature (unit K)
- is the viscosity of the solution (pascal seconds)
- is the concentration of particles per cm3
Here the frequency is independent of particle size, a result noted as counter-intuitive. For particles of different size, more elaborate expressions can be derived for estimating .[2]
References
- ↑ chem.libretexts.org: Collision Frequency
- 1 2 Debye, P. (1942). "Reaction Rates in Ionic Solutions". Transactions of the Electrochemical Society. 82 (1): 265. doi:10.1149/1.3071413. ISSN 0096-4743.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.