Chemical Experiment with Catalyst

Keywords: sum of sinusoids, differential equation

Description

The data give the concentrations at equi-spaced times of an intermediate compound during a chemical experiment involving a catalyst. The experiment was conducted in the Department of Chemistry at the Australian National University. The compound is producing exponentially during the first stage of the experiment and then is consumed exponentially during the second stage. Theoretically the process can be described by a compartment model, and the expected concentration of the compound over time is decribed by a second order differential equation.


	Variable		Description

	Concentration		Concentration of intermediate compound

Download

Data file (tab-delimited text)

Source

The data was supplied by Professor Sargeson, Department of Chemistry, Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University.

Analysis

The data is very well described by a constant term plus a sum of two exponential functions, one with a positive coefficient and one with negative.