Metal carbonyls are the most widely studied organometallic complexes. This exercise uses Gaussian with the GaussView interface to investigate the role of the metal centers on backbonding to the CO ligand. Density Functional Theory (DFT) methods were used to evaluate two classic metal pentacarbonyls, namely Fe(CO)5 and Ru(CO)5.
This is an in-class exercise for upper level inorganic students designed to highlight aspects of symmetry, group theory, MO theory, and Hückel theory. The exercise is an expansion of a Problem Set question I give to my Advanced Inorganic Chemistry class. In this activity, students will develop the MO diagram for the π system of the pentalene dianion using the Hückel approach. They will then consider the effect of folding the ring system using a Walsh diagram.
This website is a free and comprehensive resource that is a collection of open college courses that spans videos, audio lectures, and notes given by professors at a variety of universities. The website is designed to be friendly and designed to be easily accessed on any mobile device.
This is a literature-based activity that focuses on a review I recently published as part of a thematic series on C-H activation.
The review highlights similarities between the newly discovered frustrated Lewis pairs and polarized metal-ligand multiple bonds. There are many ways to use the review, but the attached set of questions focuses on drawing analogies among seemingly diverse types of reactivity using frontier-molecular-orbital considerations.
For many years I have resisted using clickers, mainly because at our university there is no standard universal clicker. I wanted to keep student costs as low as possible but also desired the type of live feedback during a lecture that clicker questions can provide. In both my general chem. (200-300 students) and upper division courses (50-75 students), I now pass out 4 or 5 colored notecards on the first day of class and make sure everyone has one of each color.
I use this exercise in my 400-level Inorganic (Transition Metals) course. Students have been introduced to assigning point groups in a 300- level Inorganic course on bonding theories. Therefore, I combine a review of assigning point groups with the introduction to inorganic nomenclature in my advanced course. This seems to break up the tedium of the rules for nomenclature while stressing that the need for such elaborate names comes from the need to correctly identify one structure among may isomeric possibilities.
This site is an excellent, well-organized collection of the chemically relevant character tables. I find it particularly helpful because it includes the cubic functions, allowing you to determine the symmetry labels of the f orbitals in a given point group; these are not included in most of the collections of character tables in general inorganic chemistry textbooks. Additionally, it has a tool that automatically reduces (correctly derived) reducible representations into their component irreducible representations.
Several years ago I began using a set of Ligand-of-the-Week exercises in my Inorganic course to encourage (force) students to go outside of our textbook and into the chemical reference materials and chemical literature to find examples of ligands that bind to metal ions. My motivation was to get my students to see the wonderful breadth of known metal-ligand complexes and to develop skills associated with analyzing and classifying ligands. My original paper is fairly complete and can be accessed via J. Chem. Educ. which is now available through the ACS website.
My technique for constructing MO diagrams is based on (and significantly simplified from) that of Verkade. While I find it works well in my classroom for my students, they benefit from careful step-by-step instruction of the method through several weeks of in-class exercises. This LO has links to pencasts where I go through three easy examples that demonstrate the technique, as well has how I handle lone pairs by this method. As transition metal complexes don’t have stereochemically active lone pairs, they are often easier to deal with than even something seemingly as simple as water!
I use this in-class exercise after I have taught the students how to construct LGOs using the generator orbital technique. The previous week, they do an in-class exercise on that topic, and this week, they use the LGOs from the previous week to construct MO diagrams.