Introduction and Analysis:

Svante August Arrhenius a Swedish chemist and physicist who was mostly known with his work related to electrolyte solutions and kinetics. Arrhenius proposed through several documents that when solid salt is dissolved in water its molecules disassociate or ionize into charged particles and the presence of electrical current was not needed, it was already provided by the ions themselves.

Arrhenius proposed from his early work a relationship between ionization and chemical reactions. From this work he derived the Arrhenius equation which uses the property of temperature with correlation of the rate.

During experiments it has been shown that as the temperature increases so does the rate. It has also been shown that the temperature is independent of the activation energy. The question that has to be determined is how much does the rate increase by when the temperature is being increased. Arrhenius derived an equation that shows the dependence of the rate constant K of chemical reactions on the temperature and the activation energy.   

Arrhenius used the data of the reaction of Ethoxide and Methyl Iodide that was complied by Hecht and Conrad in 1889. There data collected was temperature versus rate which is shown below:

The plotted data below shows a exponential connection from the plotted data of temperature versus rate:



From the data above you can now be able to determine the activiation energy at any given point. In order to determine the activiation energy you need to change the Arrhenius equation by using a natural log which would now make Arrhenius's equation to be: ln k = {-Ea/R} {1/T} + ln A

This equation will allow the expression to be shown in a linear relationship. In this relationship 1/T is now the independent variable and ln k is the dependent variable. The slope is -Ea/R and the y-intercept is ln A

The following graph shows the inverse temperature versus the natural log of the rate. Once the data is now plotted in this format it provides a straight line. Once the straight line is presented an equation can be determined from the data and graph below:

Data determined is ln of Rate and 1/Temperature



The graph is plotted from the ln of rate versus 1/Temperature



The graph shows a correlation between the ln of rate versus 1/T. Using the data provided by Hecht and Conrad, Arrhenius showed the rate and temperature are dependent of each other. Since the R value is very close to 1 it concludes that the Arrhenius equation is correct and an accurate activation energy can be determined from the Arrhenius equation. This graph shows that the activation energy is the slope of the line multiplied by the gas constant. The determined activation energy for this graph is .9992 times 8.314 which is 83.07 kj/mol which is known to be accurate because of the determined R value proved Arrhenius's equation.