화학공학소재연구정보센터
Journal of Physical Chemistry A, Vol.120, No.36, 7045-7050, 2016
About the Existence of Organic Oxonium Ions as Mechanistic Intermediates in Water Solution
This paper is aimed to show overwhelming experimental and theoretical evidence supporting the existence of organic oxonium ions (ROH2+) as mechanistic intermediates in water solution, which should be taken into account when describing important reactions, like hydrations of carbocations or C-O cleavages under acidic conditions. For the hydration reaction of tert-butyl (t-Bu+) cation, we have calculated the reaction rate between the intermediate hydrated cation t-BuOH2+ and water, showing that the concerted proton/electron transfer reaction (CPET) is very slow in comparison with experimental data. Much better accordance is achieved by assuming a sequential electron transfer/proton transfer reaction (ETPT). Thus, there is an excellent accordance between the calculated relaxation time (tau = 2.14 ps) for the ETPT process in water and experimentally determined tau values (1.0-1.5 ps) for related reactions. Moreover, there is also an excellent agreement between the potential energy of activation (del V-TS(not equal) = 3.17 kcal/mol) for the proton transfer in gas-phase, computed with the B3LYP/6-31G(d) method following the variational transition state theory (VTST), with the analogous del V(Q(EQ))(not equal) value (3.09 kcal/mol), calculated using methods based on single electron transfer (SET) reactions.