RRKM theory
The Rice–Ramsperger–Kassel–Marcus (RRKM) theory is a theory of chemical
reaction rates from a few characteristics of the potential energy surface
.
Assumption
Assume that the molecule consists of
harmonic oscillators
, which are connected and can exchange energy with each other.
- Assume the possible excitation energy of the molecule to be E, which enables the reaction to occur.
- The rate of intra-molecular energy distribution is much faster than that of reaction itself.
- As a corollary to the above, the potential energy surface does not have any "bottlenecks" for which certain vibrational modes may be trapped for longer than the average time of the reaction
Derivation
Assume that A* is an excited molecule:
where P stands for product, and A‡ for the critical atomic configuration with the minimum energy E0 along the reaction coordinate.
The unimolecular rate constant is obtained as follows:[8]
where is the microcanonical transition state theory rate constant, is the sum of states for the active degrees of freedom in the transition state, is the quantum number of angular momentum, is the collision frequency between molecule and bath molecules, and are the molecular vibrational and external rotational partition functions.
See also
References
- .
- .
- ISBN 978-0-13737123-5.