Esterification and Inorganic Acid

[SaintJude]

---

Members don't see this ad.

Kaplan asked:

What's the outcome of the reaction when a carboxylic acid is reaction with an alcohol in the presence of an inorganic acid? A: esterification (COOH + ROH = ester)

But why did they include the clause "presence of an inorganic acid"?

If it's organic, does it make a difference?

 

[pfaction]

Organic acid can be a carboxylic acid, during which case the alcohol may attack that one, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[SaintJude]

Ok. If it's not acid catalyzed, it would happen really slow as well, yeah?

P.s.: And what does it mean for a rx to happen "really slowly"? Does it mean it's energetically favorable so dG < 0 but the activation energy is really high?

(Might as well add "And what IS the meaning of life?")

 

[syoung]

From my understanding, slow reactions are just that, slow. They have high activation energies. That's why catalysts help make reactions fast, by lowering activation energies. Slow and fast reactions can be spontaneous as well as nonspontaneous (goes the other way).

 

[pfaction]

I'm no expert at kinetics and thermodynamics, but that could be one possibility, yeah, where the Ea is so high but the deltaG is negative, kind of like diamond->graphite where it's so f'n slow. Or helium leaking out of a balloon, where if you puncture it (decrease Ea) it'll occur FASTER, but the overall outcome is the SAME.

And yeah without H+ catalyst it'll occur, but much slower. We had to do this in Pharm lab, create a synthetic ester of a compound without using acid because acid ****ed up some other parts of the compound, I don't remember what it was, maybe it was pentobarb or whatever.