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Kinetics of the Toluene Reaction with OH Radical.

ABSTRACT: We calculated the kinetics of chemical activation reactions of toluene with hydroxyl radical in the temperature range from 213 K to 2500 K and the pressure range from 10 Torr to the high-pressure limit by using multistructural variational transition state theory with the small-curvature tunneling approximation (MS-CVT/SCT) and using the system-specific quantum Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel method. The reactions of OH with toluene are important elementary steps in both combustion and atmospheric chemistry, and thus it is valuable to understand the rate constants both in the high-pressure, high-temperature regime and in the low-pressure, low-temperature regime. Under the experimental pressure conditions, the theoretically calculated total reaction rate constants agree well with the limited experimental data, including the negative temperature dependence at low temperature. We find that the effect of multistructural anharmonicity on the partition functions usually increases with temperature, and it can change the calculated reaction rates by factors as small as 0.2 and as large as 4.2. We also find a large effect of anharmonicity on the zero-point energies of the transition states for the abstraction reactions. We report that abstraction of H from methyl should not be neglected in atmospheric chemistry, even though the low-temperature results are dominated by addition. We calculated the product distribution, which is usually not accessible to experiments, as a function of temperature and pressure.

SUBMITTER: Zhang RM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6750082 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Kinetics of the Toluene Reaction with OH Radical.

Zhang Rui Ming RM Truhlar Donald G DG Xu Xuefei X

Research (Washington, D.C.) 20190529

We calculated the kinetics of chemical activation reactions of toluene with hydroxyl radical in the temperature range from 213 K to 2500 K and the pressure range from 10 Torr to the high-pressure limit by using multistructural variational transition state theory with the small-curvature tunneling approximation (MS-CVT/SCT) and using the system-specific quantum Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel method. The reactions of OH with toluene are important elementary steps in both combustion and atmospheric chemist ...[more]

PMID: 31549067

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Project description:In a previous work, we have investigated the initial steps of the reaction of toluene with the hydroxyl radical using several quantum chemical approaches including density functional and composite post-Hartree-Fock models. Comparison of H-abstraction from the methyl group and additions at different positions of the phenyl ring showed that the former reaction channel is favored at room temperature. This conclusion appears at first sight incompatible with the experimental observation of a lower abundance of the product obtained from abstraction (benzaldehyde) with respect to those originating from addition (cresols). Further reactions of the intermediate radicals with oxygen, water, and additional OH radicals are explored in this paper through theoretical calculations on more than 120 species on the corresponding potential energy surface. The study of the addition reactions, to obtain the cresols through hydroxy methylcyclodienyl intermediate radicals, showed that only in the case of o-cresol the reaction proceeds by addition of O2 to the ring, internal H-transfer, and hydroperoxyl abstraction and not through direct H-abstraction. For both p- and m-cresol, instead, the reaction occurs through a higher-energy direct H-abstraction, thus explaining in part the observed larger concentration of the ortho isomer in the final products. It was also found that the benzyl radical, formed by H-abstraction from the methyl group, is able to react further if additional OH is present. Two reaction paths leading to o-cresol, two leading to p-cresol, and one leading to m-cresol were determined. Moreover, in this situation, the benzyl radical is predicted to produce benzyl alcohol, as was found in some experiments. The commonly accepted route to benzaldehyde was found to be not the energetically favored one. Instead, a route leading to the benzoyl radical (and ultimately to benzoic acid) with the participation of one water molecule was clearly more favorable, both thermodynamically and kinetically.

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Kinetics of the Toluene Reaction with OH Radical.

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Kinetics of the Toluene Reaction with OH Radical.

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