Why are bond valences not used in organic chemistry?
So far, the bond valence model seems a simple model to define the strength of a bond. So why is it not used in organic chemistry? This has mainly two reasons: • Bond valences are only valid between atoms of different electronegativity. Pauling [see his famous book about the Nature of the chemical bond, 1960] showed that the function above may be used for C-C bonds describing the bond order, but this concept was never used very much. • Single, double and delocalized bonds are sufficient to describe a molecule. Interactions between molecules are mainly ignored as the term non-bonded interactions already describe. Of course this is a simplification, but organic chemistry has other models which work fine, while inorganic chemistry struggles much more describing the properties of bonds.
