killswitch - 8-7-2011 at 20:35
Since my classes are beating us to death with equilibria, I decided it was time to take a look at kinetics, specifically dimer, grimed, and
tetramerization of ketones. In the standard acetone/H2O2/H2SO4 synthesis, very little tetramerization occurs. I don't doubt the results that Dr. Jiang
et. al. obtained with ZnCl4 * 5H2O, but I feel they left much work undone (tetraperoxides were ancillary to their research anyway).
And what of other ketones? Methyl ethyl ketone and dimethyl ketone (at least on paper) can be linked together by peroxide bonds. One peroxide is a
carcinogenic liquid, the other is a solid with serious stability issues. Would a hybrid like (((CH3)2-C)-O-O-(C-(CH3)2-CH2)-O-O-(C-(CH3)2) (a cyclic
trimer of two dimethyl ketones and one methyl ethyl ketone, or vice versa, be possible to produce? What physical properties would it possess, and what
would the kinetics look like for the tetramerization (two dimethyl ketones linked to two methyl ethyl ketones in a ring)?
Or am i wasting my time and it would just be a crunchy plastique of TATP and MEKP due to my lack of facility with kinetics?