Cyclopolymerization Reactions of Diallyl Monomers: Exploring Electronic and Steric Effects Using DFT Reactivity Indices

Electrophilicity index revisited

This review aims to be a comprehensive, authoritative, critical, and accessible review of general interest to the chemistry community; because the electrophilicity index is a very useful global reactivity descriptor defined within a conceptual density functional theory framework. Our group has also introduced electrophilicity based new global and local reactivity descriptors and also new associated electronic structure principles, which are important indicators of structure, stability, bonding, reactivity, interactions, and dynamics in a wide variety of physico-chemical systems and processes. This index along with its local counterpart augmented by the associated electronic structure principles could properly explain molecular vibrations, internal rotations and various types of chemical reactions. The concept of the electrophilicity index has been extended to dynamical processes, excited states, confined environment, spin-dependent and temperature-dependent situations, biological activity, site selectivity, aromaticity, charge removal and acceptance, presence of external perturbation through solvents, external electric and magnetic fields, and so forth. Although electrophilicity and its local variant can adequately interpret the behavior of a wide variety of systems and different physico-chemical processes involving them, their predictive potential remains to be explored. An exhaustive review on all these aspects will set the tone of the future research in that direction.

Molecular Interactions From the Density Functional Theory for Chemical Reactivity: The Interaction Energy Between Two-Reagents

Reactivity descriptors indicate where a reagent is most reactive and how it is most likely to react. However, a reaction will only occur when the reagent encounters a suitable reaction partner. Determining whether a pair of reagents is well-matched requires developing reactivity rules that depend on both reagents. This can be achieved using the expression for the minimum-interaction-energy obtained from the density functional reactivity theory. Different terms in this expression will be dominant in different circumstances; depending on which terms control the reactivity, different reactivity indicators will be preferred.

Photocatalytic production of dihydroxyacetone from glycerol on TiO2 in acetonitrile

In this paper, photocatalytic production of dihydroxyacetone (DHA) from glycerol in acetonitrile on TiO₂ was investigated. HPLC-MS analysis showed that glycerol was converted to DHA, glyceraldehyde (GAD), glyceric acid and several other chemicals. Using acetonitrile as the reaction medium instead of water not only provided a more selective process for production of DHA but also increased the glycerol conversion. After 300 min, with 1 g L⁻¹ catalyst loading and 4 mM initial glycerol concentration, glycerol conversion and DHA selectivity were 96.8% and 17.8% in acetonitrile compared to 36.1% and 14.7% in water, respectively. The half-life of glycerol decreased by a factor of 6.2, from 467 min to 75 min, by changing the solvent from water to acetonitrile. Experiments using biodiesel-derived crude glycerol verified the effectiveness of the proposed process for the photocatalytic production of DHA from crude glycerol. A mechanism was proposed to explain the higher selectivity towards DHA over GAD in this process.

Photocatalytic conversion of glycerol and selectivity for dihydroxyacetone production was increased by using acetonitrile as the reaction medium.

Cyclopolymerizations: Synthetic Tools for the Precision Synthesis of Macromolecular Architectures

Monomers possessing two functionalities suitable for polymerization are often designed and utilized in syntheses directed to the formation of cross-linked macromolecules. In this review, we give an account of recent developments related to the use of such monomers in cyclopolymerization processes, in order to form linear, soluble macromolecules. These processes can be activated by means of radical, ionic, or transition-metal mediated chain-growth polymerization mechanisms, to achieve cyclic moieties of variable ring size which are embedded within the polymer backbone, driving and tuning peculiar physical properties of the resulting macromolecules. The two functionalities are covalently linked by a "tether", which can be appropriately designed in order to "imprint" elements of chemical information into the polymer backbone during the synthesis and, in some cases, be removed by postpolymerization reactions. The two functionalities can possess identical or even very different reactivities toward the polymerization mechanism involved; in the latter case, consequences and outcomes related to the sequence-controlled, precision synthesis of macromolecules have been demonstrated. Recent advances in new initiating systems and polymerization catalysts enabled the precision syntheses of polymers with regulated cyclic structures by highly regio- and/or stereoselective cyclopolymerization. Cyclopolymerizations involving double cyclization, ring-opening, or isomerization have been also developed, generating unique repeating structures, which can hardly be obtained by conventional polymerization methods.

Steric charge

Steric charge is an informative descriptor providing novel insights to appreciate the steric effect and stereoselectivity for chemical processes and transformations.

From information theory to quantitative description of steric effects

In this study, further evidences of the efficiency of informational theory for a quantitative description of steric effects are showcased.

Steric, quantum, and electrostatic effects on S(N)2 reaction barriers in gas phase

Biomolecular nucleophilic substitution reactions, S(N)2, are fundamental and commonplace in chemistry. It is the well-documented experimental finding in the literature that vicinal substitution with bulkier groups near the reaction center significantly slows the reaction due to steric hindrance, but theoretical understanding in the quantitative manner about factors dictating the S(N)2 reaction barrier height is still controversial. In this work, employing the new quantification approach that we recently proposed for the steric effect from the density functional theory framework, we investigate the relative contribution of three independent effects-steric, electrostatic, and quantum-to the S(N)2 barrier heights in gas phase for substituted methyl halide systems, R(1)R(2)R(3)CX, reacting with the fluorine anion, where R(1), R(2), and R(3) denote substituting groups and X = F or Cl. We found that in accordance with the experimental finding, for these systems, the steric effect dominates the transition state barrier, contributing positively to barrier heights, but this contribution is largely compensated by the negative, stabilizing contribution from the quantum effect due to the exchange-correlation interactions. Moreover, we find that it is the component from the electrostatic effect that is linearly correlated with the S(N)2 barrier height for the systems investigated in the present study. In addition, we compared our approach with the conventional method of energy decomposition in density functional theory as well as examined the steric effect from the wave function theory for these systems via natural bond orbital analysis.