The Investigation of Organic Reactions and Their Mechanisms

Book excerpt: A range of alternative mechanisms can usually be postulated for most organic chemical reactions, and identification of the most likely requires detailed investigation. Investigation of Organic Reactions and their Mechanisms will serve as a guide for the trained chemist who needs to characterise an organic chemical reaction and investigate its mechanism, but who is not an expert in physical organic chemistry. Such an investigation will lead to an understanding of which bonds are broken, which are made, and the order in which these processes happen. This information and knowledge of the associated kinetic and thermodynamic parameters are central to the development of safe, efficient, and profitable industrial chemical processes, and to extending the synthetic utility of new chemical reactions in chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing, and academic environments. Written as a coherent account of the principal methods currently used in mechanistic investigations, at a level accessible to academic researchers and graduate chemists in industry, the book is highly practical in approach. The contributing authors, an international group of expert practitioners of the techniques covered, illustrate their contributions by examples from their own research and from the relevant wider chemical literature. The book covers basic aspects such as product analysis, kinetics, catalysis, and investigation of reactive intermediates. It also includes material on significant recent developments, e.g. computational chemistry, calorimetry, and electrochemistry, in addition to topics of high current industrial relevance, e.g. reactions in multiphase systems, and synthetically useful reactions involving free radicals and catalysis by organometallic compounds.