Stability constants are fundamental to understanding the behavior of
metal ions in aqueous solution. Such understanding is important in a
wide variety of areas, such as metal ions in biology, biomedical
applications, metal ions in the environment, extraction metallurgy, food
chemistry, and metal ions in many industrial processes. In spite of this
importance, it appears that many inorganic chemists have lost an
appreciation for the importance of stability constants, and the
thermodynamic aspects of complex formation, with attention focused over
the last thirty years on newer areas, such as organometallic chemistry.
This book is an attempt to show the richness of chemistry that can be
revealed by stability constants, when measured as part of an overall
strategy aimed at understanding the complexing properties of a
particular ligand or metal ion. Thus, for example, there are numerous
crystal structures of the Li+ ion with crown ethers. What do these
indicate to us about the chemistry of Li+ with crown ethers? In fact,
most of these crystal structures are in a sense misleading, in that the
Li+ ion forms no complexes, or at best very weak complexes, with
familiar crown ethers such as l2-crown-4, in any known solvent. Thus,
without the stability constants, our understanding of the chemistry of a
metal ion with any particular ligand must be regarded as incomplete. In
this book we attempt to show how stability constants can reveal factors
in ligand design which could not readily be deduced from any other
physical technique.
