MolData

INORGANIC CHEMISTRY

The following resources are available in inorganic chemistry:

1. General Chemical Information
   • CambridgeSoft maintains ChemFinder, a remarkably efficient Internet search engine, which searches for information on specific compounds by name, formula, CAS registry number, and molecular weight. Most of the hits are related to toxic properties but the search engine turns up information that most tools such as Yahoo miss.

2. General Survey
   • The 80th. anniversary issue of C&ENews published on 8 September 2003 contains an informative set of essays on the elements. The article, The Periodic Table of the Elements, is now available at the ACS Web site. The ACS also maintains its electronic periodic table which has the desirable feature of providing plots of properties such as electronegativity. This periodic table appears courtesy of W. H. Freeman Inc., publisher of Chemistry in the Community and CADRE design.
   • Wikipedia, the free Web encyclopedia, has useful entries for the chemical elements and substances.
   • WebElements, a very comprehensive periodical table, was developed by Mark Winter at the University of Sheffield and now has its own Web site. It is a mini encyclopedia of inorganic chemistry and has an extensive tabulation of chemical and physical properties including standard reduction potentials.
   • The current values of the atomic weights of the elements recommended by the IUPAC Commission on Atomic Weights is available at a Queen Mary College site.
   • Dr. Anna Cavinato and Dr. David Camp at Eastern Oregon State University have assembled Chemical Bonds, Molecular Shapes, and Molecular Models, a comprehensive tutorial on chemical bonding.
   • The periodic table produced by the Royal Society of Chemistry is a highly visual presentation of chemical information. Information is provided but a Hollywood approach to chemistry is given.
   • The Virtual Chemistry Laboratory developed at Oxford University is a groing collection of tutorials and experiments that covers the following topics in inorganic chemistry: nickel(II) complexes, metal ions in solution, superconductors, organometallic chemistry, and the structures of inorganic solids. The presentation on solid-state structure is particularly good.

3. Non-transition metals
   • Professor Martin Chaplin at South Bank University, London has developed Water: Its Structure and Properties, Web site dedicated to the most important molecule, water. The site an excellent source of information of the structure of water and its complexes with other materials.
   • Crystallographic data on zeolites are provided by the WWW page of the International Zeolite Association. Click on the ATLAS ikon to access the list of structures and on the COLLECTION ikon to access the list of powder patterns. The page also provides a glossary to the IZA's classification system.
   • M. Yoshida has prepared the Fullerene Structure Library that contains the coordinates of fullerene species as well as other information such as graphical displays of selected molecular orbitals. John Jaszczak at Michigan Technological University has assembled a page on the chemistry and mineralogy of graphite. David Tomanek of Michigan State University have developed a site devoted to nanotubes.
   • The Purdue Chemistry Department also maintains an interactive tutorial on VSEPR. You need a copy of MDLI's viewer, Chime, or Rasmol to view the structures.
   • The School of Chemistry at Queen's University of Belfast maintains a WWW page dedicated to Ionic Liquids. The page includes a short but informative tutorial.
   • Kenneth Libbrecht at the California Institute of Technology has developed Snow Crystals, an informative Web page on the solid state of water. The site includes numerous photographs of snowflakes.
   • BoronWeb has a page providing links to NMR spectra of boron compounds.

4. Transition Metals
   • Properties of the metals
     • Copper. The Copper Data Center has useful information. The link on copper compounds has the most information of use to the chemist.
     • Iron. The American Iron and Steel Institute maintains a home page with information on the production and uses of steel.
   • Purdue also has a nice tutorial reviewing the Chemistry of Coordination Compounds. Structures of ligands and complexes are included.
   • Bob Toreki has developed the Organometallic HyperTextBook that provides information on a full range of organometallic chemistry. It is organized according to classes of reactions and includes a section on the 18-electron rule. .
   • Dermot O'Hare at Oxford University has placed on the Web the lectures from his course Mechanisms of OrganometallicTransformations. Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms, a comparable set of lectures develloped by A. K. Hughes in the form of pdf files is available at a site maintained by the University of Durham.
   • If you can get through, the Web site at Uwimona on Jamaica is a treasure trove of information on transition-metal complexes including tutorials, synthesis, spectra, and structures.
   • Nick Greeves at the University of Liverpool provides a discussion with structures of lanthanide complexes and their importance in asymmetric syntheses.
   • Rainer Schobert provides the X-Ray structures of the organometallic compounds studied in his group at the University of Erlangen.
   • The Moore group at the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana has prepared the Coordination Geometry Table of d-Block Transition Elements. The information is based on the structures deposited in the Cambridge Structural Database. Pie charts are used to display the distribution of oxidation number and coordination geometries at each oxidation state for the transition metals.
   • The Web site of George Eby Research includes a discussion and a compilation of first stability constants for selected ligands and transition metal ions. The site also has a link to data tables used in MaxChelator.
   • Academic Software sells The IUPAC Stability Constants Database, a comprehensive electronic version of the IUPAC database. You can download demonstation files. The database has a number of useful visualization tools such as a graph of the dependence of K on ionic strength.

5. Solid-State Chemistry and Materials Science
   • IUCr maintains a collection of links to tutorials on crystallographic methods used to determine the structure of solids.
   • An on-line tutorial on crystal structures is available at the Institut Laue-Langevin. A VRML reader is needed to view the crystal structures.
   • Robert Downs of the University of Arizona has assembled the American Mineralogist Crystal Structure Database.. The database contains the structure of over 7000 minerals. One of the supported formats is cif, the standard adopted by the IUCR. Files in the cif format can be read by Mercury, a versatile program that can be downloaded for free from the CCDC site.
   • Chemists at Indiana University have developed Reciprocal Net, a clearinghouse for X-ray structures with coordinate files of molecules and details on the cystallography of substances. The Crystallography Open Database is an alternate gratis source of crystal structures.
   • The USGS Imaging Lab maintains an extensive library of spectra of minerals.
   • Extensive information on minerals with an emphasis on crystallography is provided by the Athena project at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and by the Mineralogy Database of David Bartehelmy. Theo Kloprogge of Queensland University of Technology maintains Vibrational Spectroscopy and Photoatlas of Minerals. His Website provides data and photographs of minerals. Spectral data such as Raman spectra are available for several minerals.
   • The Minerals Spectroscopy Server maintained by George Rossman at CalTech is a valuable collection of spectroscopic data on minerals. Visible, infrared, and Raman spectra are provided.
   • The Geokem (Geochemistry of Igneous Rocks) Website at the University of Mainz is an on-line textbook on har-rock geochemistry.
   • Materials By Design site at Cornell University is a comprehensive tutorial on dedicated to properties the characterization, structure, and properties of materials and the applications of these materials, e.g. the construction of golf clubs.
   • AZOM, subtitled Metals, Ceramics, Polymers, Composites: An Engineer's Resource, is a clearing house for information including material properties such as specific heat of a wide range of materials.
   • A Navy site at the Naval Research Lab provides a useful set of crystal lattice structures.
   • The Molecular Science Project at UCLA has developed Crystalline Solids, a program that displays the crystal structure of a wide variety of binary substances and elements. The program which can be downloaded or used on-line, is very useful for teaching packing models.
   • Rruff is a collection of Raman spectra and powder XRD patterns of over 4,000 minerals. It is maintained by Robert Downs at the University of Arizona.
   • Mindat Books provides at no cost images pdf format of classics in the field of mineralogy. You have to register in order to access the collection.
   • Nanotechnology is an emerging field of materials science. For information, consult the following pages:
     • The TecNANO page maintained by the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing.
     • The Xerox page which has information about molecular nanotechnology and links to on-line articles.
     • Nanocrystals and molecular clusters are active areas of research. Very useful libraries of clusters with coordinate files are the Cambridge Cluster Database and the Birmingham Cluster Web.
     • The NASA site which has images and movies on molecular machines. Also check out a second site maintained by NASA Ames.
     • The Nanotechnology Simulation Hub, run at Purdue and co-sponsored by the NSF, is a not only a collection of information but also a virtual lab with a suite of simulation tools. Registration is required but free.
     • IBM's Almaden Laboratory hosts the STM Gallery, a collection of images taken with a STM microscope.
     • American Elements, a supplier of nanomaterials and inorganic materials used in their preparation, provides in its Web page information about these substances.

   Return to the home page.

   last updated, 12 June 2008