Improvements in the apparatus for measuring the velocity of very rapid chemical reactions

Extract

During the last year the homogeneous reactions of haemoglobin, and the heterogeneous reactions of the red blood corpuscle, have continued to furnish us with abundant opportunity for the application of our method for measuring the velocity of very rapid chemical reactions*. The recent types of apparatus, which we have devised, have not departed in essentials from the general principle previously employed, but a number of modifications and extensions have been introduced to meet with greater efficiency the special conditions which were imposed upon us. Since these developments would seem to be of much wider application than the special purposes for which they were in the first place designed, we think that it may be useful to workers in other fields to give a brief summary of their general features here. In the present paper we shall accordingly describe the methods we have adopted for 1. Very fast reactions. 2. Very slow reactions. 3. Very dilute solutions. 4. Small quantities of fluid. 5. Reactions following one another in rapid succession. 6. Reactions involving short-lived transient compounds. 7. The detection of concentration gradients in heterogeneous reacting solutions. Special apparatus has been devised to deal with each of these cases which will be briefly described in the following sections.