Reaction mechanism, rate constants, and product yields for the oxidation of Cyclopentadienyl and embedded five-member ring radicals with hydroxyl

Abstract

Potential energy surfaces for the C5H5 + OH and C15H9 + OH reactions have been studied by ab initio calculations at the CCSD(T)-F12/cc-pVTZ-f12//B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) and G3(MP2,CC)//B3LYP/6-311G(d,p) levels of theory, respectively, in order to unravel the mechanism of oxidation of the cyclopentadienyl radical and five-member-ring radicals embedded in a sheet of six-member rings with OH. The VRC-TST approach has been employed to compute high-pressure-limit rate constants for barrierless entrance and exit reaction steps and multichannel/multiwell RRKM-ME calculations have been utilized to produce phenomenological pressure- and temperature-dependent absolute and individual-channel reaction rate constants. The calculations allowed us to quantify relative yields of various products in a broad range of conditions relevant to combustion and to generate rate expressions applicable for kinetic models of oxidation of aromatics. The C5H5 + OH reaction is shown to proceed either by well-skipping pathways without stabilization of C5H6O intermediates leading to the bimolecular products ortho-C5H5O + H, C5H4OH (hydroxycyclopentadienyl) + H, and C4H6 (1,3-butadiene) + CO, or via stabilization of the C5H6O intermediates, which then undergo unimolecular thermal decomposition to ortho-C5H5O + H and C4H6 + CO. The well-skipping and stabilization/dissociation pathways compete depending on the reaction conditions; higher pressures favor the stabilization/dissociation and higher temperature favor the well-skipping channels. For the C15H9 + OH reactions, the results demonstrate that embedding decreases the oxidation rate constants and hinder the decarbonylation process; the removal of CO grows less likely as the number of common edges of the five-member ring with the surrounding six-member rings increases.