Abstract
A NUMBER of workers have obtained results which indicate that only a portion of an adsorbed monolayer of stearic acid will react immediately with a copper substrate. (Of course, the reaction is actually with cuprous oxide since, at room temperature in air, all clean copper surfaces rapidly oxidize to cuprous oxide.) Bowden and Moore1 studied this reaction by putting stearic acid monolayers on radioactive copper and measuring the activity which could be removed by extraction with benzene. They found that when they placed a Langmuir–Blodgett monolayer of stearic acid on a copper surface and allowed it to stand for 18 hr. or heated it, only about 0.14 atom of copper reacts for every molecule of acid in the monolayer. They interpreted this as signifying that their procedure lost 75 per cent of the cupric stearate activity, due to adsorption on their equipment, since reaction was presumed to be complete. Consequently, they adopted an empirical correction factor of 4.
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References
Bowden, F. P., and Moore, A. C., Trans. Farad. Soc., 47, 900 (1951).
Beischer, D. E., J. Phys. Chem., 57, 134 (1953).
Sandell, E. B., “Colorimetric Determination of Traces of Metals”, 309 (Interscience Pub., Inc., New York, 2nd edit., 1950).
Preston, G. D., and Bircumshaw, L. L., Phil. Mag., vii, 20, 706 (1935).
Tingle, E. D., Nature, 160, 710 (1947).
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DOBRY, A., MAHNCKE, H. Reaction of Stearic Acid Monolayers with Copper and Cuprous Oxide. Nature 174, 507 (1954). https://doi.org/10.1038/174507a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/174507a0
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