Developing a Mastery of Coordination Complexes

Learning Objectives
• Be able to determine the coordination number, oxidation state, and d electron count in a transition metal complex.
• Become familiar with the common ligands and indicate if they are monodentate, bidentate, or polydentate.
• Be able to determine the number of isomers a coordination complex has.
• Be able to visualize the orbital interactions between a transition metal ion and its ligands and realize how the interactions relate to the splitting of the d orbitals in crystal field theory.
• Become familiar with the UV–Vis spectrometer and how absorbance is related to the color we see with our eyes.
• Be able to relate the color of a transition metal complex with its position in the spectrochemical series.

Why Study Coordination Complexes?
Transition metals utilize their valence d-orbitals to form coordination complexes, which have characteristics important to industry, technology, and medicine. Coordination complexes exist in every color of the rainbow and can be found in jewelry, steel, paints, anticancer drugs, and photographic films. Most catalysts contain transition metal complexes and they are commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry. These two areas are vitally important to research chemists and are rapidly growing. A better understanding of the fundamentals of coordination complexes will help you understand current materials and will help chemists improve how these materials function.

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