Your company has developed an organic molecule with commercial potential and you know how to produce it in the lab. You want to

Question

3 years ago

14

Your company has developed an organic molecule with commercial potential and you know how to produce it in the lab. You want to

increase production and make as much of the molecule as possible, but the reaction has a positive ΔG°. What can you do to try to drive the reaction toward your desired product?
(A) add an enzyme that does not couple to another reaction
(B) continually remove products
(C) increase the concentration of reactants
(D) add some products initially to get the reaction primed

Chemistry

1 answer:

Lena [83] · Answer 1 · 2022-07-23T17:36:09+03:00

Answer:

(B) continually remove products

(C) increase the concentration of reactants

Explanation:

You can drive the production rate of an equilibrium reaction by handling several factors: temperature, reactant concentrations, and product concentrations are the main of those factors.

The thermodynamic variable that tells whether a chemical reaction is spontaneous is the free energy, ΔG:

ΔG < 0 represents a driving force in the forward direction,

ΔG > 0 represents a driving force in the reverse direction,

ΔG = 0 represents that the system is at equilibrium.

ΔG is related with ΔG° per the expression:

ΔG = ΔG° + RT ln Q

Where Q represents the ratio between the molar concentration of the products (each raised to its stoichiometric coefficient) and the molar concentrations of the reactants (each raised to its stoichiometric coefficient).

Since, you want to increase your production, means you want to favor the forward reaction and that means that you want to make ΔG more negative.

So, you want to make the term RT lnQ more netative.

Logarithm function of a rational expression gets more negative when the numerator decreases or the denominator increases.

So, you want either reduce the amount of products or increase the amount of reactants, which is given by the options B and C:

(B) continually remove products

(C) increase the concentration of reactants

Enzymes are a kind of catalyst. In an equilibrium reaction, a catalys speeds up both the forward and reverse reaction rates equally, so the equilibrium concentrations will not change. So, adding an enzyme (choice A) would help if you, continually remove products (B) or increase the concentration of reactants (C).

Adding products to get the reaction primed (D) will not help because that just would drive to the consumption of part of the products to obtain some reactants until reaching the equilibrium.