Introduction to Physical Chemistry

In this section we will discuss the basics of chemical energetics and thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, oxidation-reduction reactions, and acids and bases and relationship between acid-base chemistry to chemical equilibrium. This course will teach the effect of temperature, pressure, catalyst, and surface area on rate of a reaction, predict the rate law of reaction. Improve your knowledge on strong and weak acids – bases, pH and pOH of a solution. This course will also teach you how to solve problems involving neutralization reaction. Describe endothermic process and exothermic process.

This course will help you gain an understanding on the overall enthalpy changes in terms of the energy changes associated with the breaking and making of covalent bonds, represent energy changes by energy profile diagrams, including reaction enthalpy changes and activation energies.

This course will provide an understanding on oxidation-reduction reactions or redox reactions, steps to determine the oxidation number of chemical compounds. You will also learn how to define oxidation and reduction (redox) in terms of oxygen/hydrogen gain/loss and electron transfer and the several ways to approach balancing redox reactions along with step by step procedure and few examples.

This course will help you learn about rate of reactions and steps required to determine the rate of a reaction, learn how to write the rate law of a reaction and few examples to determine the rate of an equation and order of the equation. The course will help describe the effect of concentration, pressure, particle size, catalyst, and temperature on the rates of reactions and explain these effects in terms of collisions between reacting particles. You will learn the different methods to determine the rate law or order of the reaction using concentration-time data and interpret data obtained from experiments concerned with rate of reaction.