A change in solvent commonly gives rise to major changes in the rates and equilibria of chemical reactions. While solvent effects have long been studied, their quantitative analysis is a relatively recent achievement. The crucial step in this development lies in the solvatochromic approach, above all associated with Taft and coworkers [1, 2], which is a multiple regression technique that relies on giving numerical values to the solvent properties concerned. In this methodology, spectroscopic shifts, mostly ultraviolet (UV) or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) but sometimes of other sorts, are used to generate values for each property by comparison with a standard nonpolar solvent, for example, cyclohexane, as described in the following sections. The thermodynamic status of these shifts is uncertain: they were originally supposed to be free-energy related but they are not free energies per se and some have been demonstrated [3] to represent blends of G with H. As used in linear solvation energy relationships (LSER), however (see discussion below), the values themselves are unexceptionable provided that they are proportional to the energy of the molecular property they purport to describe, and even their precise thermodynamic status is of muted importance if they are mutually orthogonal. Essentially, LSER is an empirical topic and here will be treated as such.
The Taft-Kamlet LSER MethodologyThe overall LSER equation in its most comprehensive form [1] is set out as follows:where XYZ is the free energy of the process, rate, or equilibrium, in a given solvent, XYZ 0 is the value expected for the solvent cyclohexane, and the remaining terms list * This author is deceased.Tautomerism: Methods and Theories, First Edition. Edited by Liudmil Antonov.