The present monograph appears after the death of Professor V. N. Kondratiev, one of those scientists who have greatly contributed to the foundation of contem porary gas kinetics. The most fundamental idea of chemical kinetics, put for ward at the beginning of the twentieth century and connected with names such as W. Nernst, M. Bodenstein, N. N. Semenov, and C. N. Hinshelwood, was that the complex chemical reactions are in fact a manifestation of a set of simpler elementary reactions involving but a small number of species. V. N. Kondratiev was one of the first to adopt this idea and to start investigations on the elementary chemical reactions proper. These investigations revealed explicitly that every elementary reaction in turn consisted of many elementary events usually referred to as elementary processes. It took some time to realize that an elementary reaction, represented in a very simple way by a macroscopic kinetic equation, can be described on a microscopic level by a generalized Boltzmann equation. Neverheless, up to the middle of the twentieth century, gas kinetics was mainly concerned with the interpretation of complex chemical reactions via a set of elementary reactions. But later on, the situation changed drastically. First, the conditions for reducing microscopic cquations to macroscopic ones were clearly set up. These are essentially based on the fact that the small perturbations of the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution are caused by the reaction proper.

Flash Vacuum Thermolysis (FVT) techniques have become well-established methods and occupy an increasingly important place in synthesis. Gas Phase Reactions in Organic Synthesis is a complete review of the applications of flash vacuum thermolysis in organic chemistry; it features new developments in FVT, flow thermolysis and vacuum gas-solid reactions which have appeared in scientific literature since 1980.

Kinetics and Dynamics of Elementary Gas Reactions surveys the state of modern knowledge on elementary gas reactions to understand natural phenomena in terms of molecular behavior. Part 1 of this book describes the theoretical and conceptual background of elementary gas-phase reactions, emphasizing the assumptions and limitations of each theoretical approach, as well as its strengths. In Part 2, selected experimental results are considered to demonstrate the scope of present day techniques and illustrate the application of the theoretical ideas introduced in Part 1. This publication is intended primarily for working kineticists and chemists, but is also beneficial to graduate students.

The book brings together, for the first time, all aspects of reactions of metallic species in the gas phase and gives an up-to-date overview of the field. Reactions covered include those of atomic, other free radical and transient neutral species, as well as ions. Experimental and theoretical work is reviewed and the efforts to establish a closer link between these approaches are discussed. The field is mainly approached from a fundamental point-of-view, but the applied problems which have helped stimulate the interest are pointed out and form the major subject of the final chapters. These emphasize the competition between purely gas-phase and gas-surface reactions.

The field of gas phase inorganic ion chemistry is relatively new; the early studies date back approximately twenty years, but there has been intense interest and development in the field in the last ten years. As with much of modern chemistry, the growth in gas phase inorganic ion chemistry can be traced to the development of instrumentation and new experimental methods. Studies in this area require sophisticated instruments and sample introduc tion/ ionization methods, and often these processes are complicated by the need for state-selecting (or collisionally stabilizing) the reactive species in order to assign the chemistry unequivocally. At the present level of experimental development, a wide range of experiments on diverse ionic systems are possible and many detailed aspects of the chemistry can be studied. Gas Phase Inorganic Chemistry focuses on the reactions of metal ions and metal clusters, and on the study of these species using the available modern spectroscopic methods. Three of the twelve chapters cover the chemistry of ionic monometal transition metal ions and the chemistry of these species with small diatomics and model organics. Two of the chapters focus on the studies of the chemical and physical properties of (primarily) transition metal clusters, and these chapters review experimental methods and capabilities. Two chapters also deal with the chemistry of transition metal carbonyl clusters, and these chapters address issues important to cluster growth and activation as well as the characterization of such species.

This book is dedicated to gas-phase thermal reactions which take place in engines, burners, and industrial reactors for the production of mechanical or thermal energy, for the incineration of pollutants, or for the manufacture of chemicals. It also studies their effect on the environment: fires, explosions, tropospheric pollution, the greenhouse effect, and holes in the ozone layer. After a short reminder of the concepts and laws of thermodynamics, and of chemical and physical kinetics, the book suggests a methodology for the kinetic modelling of these reactions: generation and reduction of reaction mechanisms, estimation of kinetic data of elementary reactions, estimation of the thermodynamic data and transport data of molecules and free radicals, and analysis and validation of mechanisms by comparison of calculated results with the experimental results obtained using laboratory reactors. The models thus generated carry all the information necessary to allow them to be incorporated into computer programs for the calculation of reactors or of the fluid dynamics of reacting gases. Tables of numerical data and a list of computer programs and URLs complete the book.