Bond Dissociation Energies = Homolytic Cleavage
Here’s a point which causes a lot of confusion. Look at these two reactions. What do you think is the stronger bond, O-H or C-H?
Read moreFree Radical Reactions
Free Radical Reactions
With rare exceptions, until now every reaction we’ve discussed (acid-base, substitution, elimination, addition) has involved the formation of bonds between an electron pair donor (Lewis
Read more3 Factors That Stabilize Free Radicals
In the last post we introduced free radicals – neutral, electron-deficient chemical species with a partially filled orbital – and learned that they are highly
Read moreWhat Factors Destabilize Free Radicals?
In the last post we talked about several factors that stabilize free radicals. We saw that since free radicals can be considered electron deficient, any
Read moreBond Strengths And Radical Stability
EDIT: More caution is required than I had previously indicated regarding the main thesis of this post – that free radical stabilities are solely reflected
Read moreFree Radical Initiation: Why Is “Light” Or “Heat” Required?
If you come across just a few free-radical reactions, you should notice a familiar pattern. Every free-radical reaction that you’ll encounter is accompanied by either
Read moreInitiation, Propagation, Termination
Waaay back when we started to go through free radical substitution reactions, you might recall that we looked a reaction like this one: Now that
Read moreIsomers From Free Radical Reactions
Last time we covered a comparatively simple reaction: free-radical chlorination of methane to (CH4) to give chloromethane (CH3Cl) and saw that the reaction proceeds through
Read moreSelectivity In Free Radical Reactions
In the last post we showed some examples of how different isomers might be formed in free-radical halogenation of alkanes. And I left off with
Read moreSelectivity in Free Radical Reactions: Bromine vs. Chlorine
In last blog post on radicals we saw this data that compares the chlorination of propane vs. the bromination of propane: Bromination: We also saw
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