Thermodynamic and kinetic properties of metal ions in aqueous solution

While it is evident that a metal ion in aqueous solution interacts electrostatically with water molecules and the anions present in the solution, it is equally apparent that often the metal ion chemically combines with varying numbers of ions or molecules to form complex species. This tendency towards coordination complexing is observed most often with the transition metals and results in a series of complex species MA with n being the number of ligand molecules A which are cpmplexed to the metal ion M and is equal to 1, 2, ..., N-1, N, where N is the maximum observed coordination number but not necessarily identical with Werner vs coordination number for the metal ion. A portion of the work abstracted in this paper was concerned with devising a simple method for the determination of kn2 where kn1 = (MAn)/(MAn-1)(A).