Is dissociative and dissociation the same thing?

[Tyler.davis]

I'm doing some work on fuel cells. When breaking the O-O bond between oxygen gas, two of the three ways involve the word dissociative. However, the sentence is Breaking the O-O bond, which may be dissociative or associatively dissociative. This doesn’t sound grammatically or phonetically correct. Can I instead say breaking the O-O bond by dissociation or associatively dissociation.

[studiot]

53 minutes ago, Tyler.davis said:

I'm doing some work on fuel cells. When breaking the O-O bond between oxygen gas, two of the three ways involve the word dissociative. However, the sentence is Breaking the O-O bond, which may be dissociative or associatively dissociative. This doesn’t sound grammatically or phonetically correct. Can I instead say breaking the O-O bond by dissociation or associatively dissociation.

Well dissociation is the noun, which can stand by itself.

Dissociative is an adjective which needs something to describe eg 'a dissociative reaction' (although many authors talk of dissociation reactions).

Dissociation is a process which you may wish to distinguish from the reaction as only part of the overall reaction which may involve dissociation and other processes.

"associatively dissociation. "  is totally incorrect as you are trying to qualify a noun with an adverb.

I would in any case frown on the correct, but confusing, English associative dissociation.

Does this help ?

Edited April 11, 2021 by studiot

[exchemist]

4 hours ago, Tyler.davis said:

I'm doing some work on fuel cells. When breaking the O-O bond between oxygen gas, two of the three ways involve the word dissociative. However, the sentence is Breaking the O-O bond, which may be dissociative or associatively dissociative. This doesn’t sound grammatically or phonetically correct. Can I instead say breaking the O-O bond by dissociation or associatively dissociation.

Perhaps if you could explain a bit about the route that you have seen described as "associatively dissociative, we could suggest an alternative description that does not seem so self-contradictory.  

I tried googling this term in relation to fuel cells and could not find it. The closest thing I found was something about dissociative adsorption of oxygen. 

[BabcockHall]

Dissociative or associative might be applied to the nature of the transition state.  Dissociative means that the transition state is open (exploded), and associative means the opposite.

[exchemist]

56 minutes ago, BabcockHall said:

Dissociative or associative might be applied to the nature of the transition state.  Dissociative means that the transition state is open (exploded), and associative means the opposite.

What transition state, in what process? And what do you mean by an open or "exploded" transition state? It's a bit hard to comment without any information about this .   

[BabcockHall]

I can't say which transition state without knowing the other reactants besides oxygen.  Let me limit myself to nucleophilic substitution reactions for the sake of illustration.  By an open transition state I mean one in which the leaving group has largely left (the bond order to the central atom might be roughly 0.2) and the nucleophile is only weakly present (bond order also might be around 0.20).  The opposite situation (a tight transition state) is one in which the leaving group has just begun to depart (bond order of 0.8 or so) and the nucleophile has largely made a bond to the central atom.

[exchemist]

32 minutes ago, BabcockHall said:

I can't say which transition state without knowing the other reactants besides oxygen.  Let me limit myself to nucleophilic substitution reactions for the sake of illustration.  By an open transition state I mean one in which the leaving group has largely left (the bond order to the central atom might be roughly 0.2) and the nucleophile is only weakly present (bond order also might be around 0.20).  The opposite situation (a tight transition state) is one in which the leaving group has just begun to depart (bond order of 0.8 or so) and the nucleophile has largely made a bond to the central atom.

OK I see, thanks for the explanation. Well, it's been almost a month but maybe our poster will return and enlighten us....  

[Tyler.davis]

Thank you all for you help, i decided to stick with what i originally wrote