During 1958 a book on the kinetics of homogeneous gas reactions was published by Kondratiev (1). In addition, two independent translations of the firs t part of Semenov's book (2, 3) of 1954, slightly modernised by the author, and two symposia on gas kinetics (4, 5) appeared. Semenov's book was originally written, with the help of several colleagues, as an introduction to a symposium. Therefore, it properly attempts to raise points for dis cussion rather than to present a full cri tical survey of gas kinetics. The papers in the symposium were chiefly short reviews of the authors' work which have been or will be published elsewhere. Kondratiev's book, on the other hand, is a comprehensive survey of the whole field. It is interesting to note that approximately one-quarter of the references in it are taken from the Russian literature. In this respect, the shortcomings of this review will be obvious. The language difficulty is aggravated by the inaccessibility of some of the Russian journals and by the fact that comparatively few of them become available during the year in which they are published.No revolutionary developments in gas kinetics have occurred during the year, although much solid progress has been made, particularly in the study of elementary reactions. For the first time, however, large numbers of papers have been published that report work in which gas chromatography has been used for analyses. The development of gas kinetics has always been closely linked to the progress of analytical techniques. The application of gas chro matography has made possible the investigation of many new systems (par ticularly those involving less volatile materials) and the far more detailed study of familiar reactions.Before considering the year's work in de tail, one general remark may be made. It would be· of great assistance to reviewers and others if authors who report results in terms of the Arrhenius or similar equations would always give values of both the activation energies and the A factors (or the A factor ratios). It is tedious to have to work back from selected rate constants and, worse still, from steric factors (the collision diameters assumed are fre quently not reported).
THEORYThe most progress has been made in the understanding of the processes of the transfer of energy from molecules containing sufficient energy to react.Bunker & Davidson (6) assumed that MI complexes were first formed in the combination of iodine atoms in the presence of a third body, M. Good agree ment with experiment was obtained if there was a Lennard-Jones potential 1 The survey of literature was completed on November 15, 1958. 53 Annu. Rev. Phys. Chem. 1959.10:53-76. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of California -Davis on 02/05/15. For personal use only. Quick links to online content Further ANNUAL REVIEWS