Kinetics question

The question is "Give one reason why most collisions between gas phase reactants do not lead to a reaction."
Surely in a gas particles move faster so collisions are more likely to lead to a successfull collision than reactants in liquid or solid phase??
Thanks

Nonetheless the answer is "most collisions have energy less than the activation energy of the reaction and thus the reaction cannot proceed". You are right in what you say about gaseous vs liquid/solid phase reactants but nonetheless gaseous particles mostly do not have nearly enough energy.

Nonetheless the answer is "most collisions have energy less than the activation energy of the reaction and thus the reaction cannot proceed". You are right in what you say about gaseous vs liquid/solid phase reactants but nonetheless gaseous particles mostly do not have nearly enough energy.

so do gases usually not have enough energy to react not because the gas particles themselves do not have much energy, but because the activation energy for reactions in the gas phase is usually very high?
Sorry for late reply I am revising and have got confused.
Thanks a lot.

The way I understand it, by the time you reach a temperature so high you have pushed the Maxwell-Boltzmann curve far enough to the right for most gaseous particles to have energy > activation energy, you'll have lost the potential for chemical reactions at all because your matter will be highly ionized (plasma?).

OK thanks i think plasma is beyond AS AQA syllabus but thanks anyway. The key word is not 'gas phase' but 'most' i think

I can't think why plasma would be the domain of chemistry at all, much less the AS syllabus Completely ionized atoms won't be able to react ...

The way I understand it, by the time you reach a temperature so high you have pushed the Maxwell-Boltzmann curve far enough to the right for most gaseous particles to have energy > activation energy, you'll have lost the potential for chemical reactions at all because your matter will be highly ionized (plasma?).

so do gases usually not have enough energy to react not because the gas particles themselves do not have much energy, but because the activation energy for reactions in the gas phase is usually very high?
Sorry for late reply I am revising and have got confused.
Thanks a lot.

Barriers are all relative. It is x joules above the ground state energy so doesn't matter what thet absolute energy is. Gases are in general high energy species (especially in terms of kinetic energy).

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The question is "Give one reason why most collisions between gas phase reactants do not lead to a reaction."
Surely in a gas particles move faster so collisions are more likely to lead to a successfull collision than reactants in liquid or solid phase??
Thanks

The activation energy barrier increases as the average energy of the particles increases?! But I was taught that if you increased the temperature then a greater number of particles have energy > activation energy?