Posted: Apr 15, 2010 1:29 pm
rainbow wrote:No problem with that. They are tweaking the concentrations and purities to improve the chances of the desired reaction taking place.
Do you have a citation to back up this claim? Has the author specified this reasoning somewhere?
rainbow wrote:It does however mean that they are moving away from plausible conditions though.
This is simply an assertion which you have yet to substantiate with experimental support.
We don't have the authors reasonings for their starting concentrations. It is entirely possible that you are correct, but you haven't shown that. It may also simply be a case of the authors wishing to make a large sample-size from which to do easy measurements on the products of the reaction. It may also be the case that the reaction can take place at extremely low concentrations, but that this will require a lot of time to complete and will be hard to reliably measure.
As I have said before I personally suspect that the author wanted insights into all the individual steps in the whole chain of reactions from the start to the end product, which is why you would see them break up the experiment in the many steps with sample preparations for analysis in between.