Chemistry 410B
Physical Chemistry

instructor: Andrew Cooksy, CSL-310, 594-5571
email: acooksy@sciences.sdsu.edu
Office Hours: Mon 11am-12:30pm and Wed,Fri 11-11:30am; CSL-310.
Example sessions: Mon 6-7:00pm, GMCS-214.
text: CHEM 410B reader, on sale at Aztec Bookstore for $34.50.

Course Syllabus
Current Course Calendar
Downloads (login and password the same as for the the Ch. 0 download, and will be given in lecture).
Recommended review problems
Corrections to the text

Announcements

• Review of 410A Material: Monday May 12 2-3:30pm LL 430.

  I'll be in Love Library 430 on Monday to go over the topics from 410A in preparation for the ACS exam Wednesday morning.

• All exam, quiz, practice set solutions have been posted

  to the downloads page. Please let me know if you have trouble with any of the links.

• Extended office hours during finals week.

  I'll be available to answer questions about the course between 12:30 and 1:30 Mon and 12:30 and 2:30 Tue-Thu the week of finals (May 12-15).

• THE OFFICIAL FINAL EXAM

  is scheduled for Wednesday, May 7 and Friday, May 9 from 9:00 to 9:50 am:

  • The Wednesday exam form will consist of 7 or 8 questions covering roughly Chapters 13 through 18, give or take a chapter.
  • The Friday exam form will consist of 8 or 7 questions (to make a total of 15 for both exams), covering the remaining chapters. Roughly 3 of these questions will focus on material covered since exam 6.
  Please note, however, that any question may rely partly on material from anywhere in the course. For example, the Wednesday form could include a question about partition functions in the context of kinetics, so that the methods used to solve the problem are from Ch. 13 but the application is relevant to Ch. 24. Plan your studying accordingly.

  The scores from both forms will be tallied in the same spreadsheet, and your best 12 scores on the 15 exam problems will be added for your total exam score. Otherwise, this exam follows the same format as other exams, with each questions worth 25 points, open book and notes, whatever calculator you choose to bring, etc. The usual exam guidelines are outlined in the Course Syllabus.

• CHEM 410B final exams

  Please carefully read the section of the syllabus relating to the CHEM 410B final exams. Our official final exam is scheduled for the last two days of class, so that the standardized ACS exam may be offered in the scheduled 2-hour final exam slot. Therefore, your attendance the last two days of class is mandatory. Please contact me right away if you have any questions about this.

  (New) The ACS exam will be given under typical standardized text conditions. The exam is multiple choice and scored by Scantron. You will need a #2 pencil and that's it. You will be given scratch paper, a periodic table and table of fundamental constants. You are not permitted to use any other materials: no notes, no textbook, no calculator (very little of the exam is numerical). Electronics must be silenced and inaccessible. I will permit food, but (for example) pastries with thermochemical data iced onto them will be confiscated.

• P-Chem texts on reserve:

  Here's my run-down on these texts, which should be on reserve at Love Library:
  • Atkins, Elements of P. Chem. This text is written for a 1-semester, non-calculus course, so it doesn't cover any of the material in the same depth that we do, and some topics are omitted completely, but it may be useful for a faster and easier overview of our topics. (And no, we don't offer that course here.) At least one of your classmates has looked at this and recommends it highly because it can offer a big-picture summary of what we cover.
  • Noggle, Physical Chemistry. Noggle's is the only book I ever used for the course. I think it's very well written, and reads more smoothly than most other p-chem books. The topics are out of order, from my perspective, so what we cover in 410A is in the second half of the book, and most of our 410B material is in the first half of the book.
  • Berry, Rice, Ross, Physical Chemistry. This is a huge book, originally published in 3 volumes for the schools that had a p-chem course offered over 3 quarters. It's got just about everything in it, so if you're just looking for another perspective on one topic, this may be a good choice. In some places it's more advanced than our course. Generally speaking, the topics are organized in the same manner as in my course.
  • McQuarrie and Simon, Physical Chemistry. Similar comments as for Berry, Rice, and Ross, but this is a slightly shorter text. One of the authors, McQuarrie, has written an excellent Statistical Mechanics text for graduate students, so you should find this text authoritative (but not necessarily easy) on that subject.
  • Then there are texts I don't know as well by Woodbury and by Levine. These are more similar to Noggle's book in organization, and Levine's was one of the more popular books when it was current.

• The Statistical and Thermal Physics Simulations site

  has lots of nifty Java animations for demonstrating some of the principles we come across in Chapters 13-16.

Corrections to Spring 2008 410B lecture notes

• p. 16, Eq. 13.20. Delete the last equality, which is just a repeat of the previous equality.
• p. 19, equation preceding Eq. 13.23. The lefthand side of the equation should read "d lng_r".
• p. 21, equation above Eq. 13.31. The integral is of x² e^-ax2 dx.
• p. 30, paragraph 2. The coordinate q should still be s.
• p. 45, Fig. 14.1. Delete the last four boxes in row 1, and the last two boxes in row 2.
• p. 47, Eq. 14.10. The last two lines should be integrating the e^{-beta U} over X₃...Z_N.
• p. 138, Table 16.6. The first two k values in the third column should be 41.1 (Al at 1 K) and 235 (Al at 10 K).
• p. 177, third line below Eq. 17.28. Change "derivative of pressure" to "derivative of volume".
• p. 179, Eq. 17.34. Just above the final equation, -k_BT² should be +k_BT².
• p. 240, Example 20.6. The value for Delta H should be 29240 J/mol instead of 29820 J/mol. This changes ln P to -1.28 and the pressure to 0.28 bar.
• p. 244, last line. The numerator of the fraction should be Nu₀ instead of nu₀.
• p. 272, Eq. 21.43. In the first line, the term in mu_A(l)/T² should have a minus sign in front. The second line is correct.
• p. 274, Example 21.1. The final value of Delta T_f is -0.37, so the final temperature is 272.78 K.
• p. 343, Eq. 24.2. In the next to last line, change the factors k₁/(k₁+k_-1) to 1/(k₁+k_-1).

Corrections to Spring 2008 410B problem solutions

• Problem 14.13. Remove the extra factor of 1/V in the first set of equations for the average of U (before the words "In the fourth step"). That factor correctly appears after changing the volume element to dR in the second set of equations.
• Problem 14.18. The final equation for a should have a factor of N_A² instead of N_A. The final numerical value for a should be 0.713 instead of 7.13, and that makes B₂ equal to -0.025.
• Problem 14.25. There should be a factor of 1/2 in front of the integral in parts 2 and 3, to account for the normalization in part 1.
• Problem 14.35. The vibrational partition function is missing the final ")^-1". The numerical answer is correct.
• Problem 14.37. The factor 1/T in the final line should be 1/1.
• Problem 16.16. The solution confuses CGS and SI units for a line, but the final answer is correct and obtainable if the SI values are plugged in for all parameters.
• Problem 18.10. Propane of course should have formula C₃H₈, not C₆H₈.
• Problem 18.16. The final equation should begin "C_P = C_V + ..." instead of "C_P + C_V + ..."
• Problem 18.17. P₁ should be replaced by 1.0 bar instead of 10 bar in the second line. The final answer should still be correct.
• Problem 22.1d. The value should be 120 kJ/mol instead of 120 kJ/mol.

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Web minion: A.L. Cooksy. Last modified: May 09 2008 08:48:37.