Ozone reaction with aromatic compound

Aromatic compounds are of great interest in the chemistry of the urban atmosphere because of their abundance in motor vehicle emissions and because of their reactivity with respect to ozone and organic aerosol formation. The major atmospheric sink for aromatics is reaction with the hydroxyl radical. Whereas rate constants for the OH reaction with aromatics have been well characterized (Calvert et al. 2002), mechanisms of aromatic oxidation following the initial OH attack have been highly uncertain. Aromatic compounds of concern in urban atmospheric chemistry are given in Figure 6.16. 

Oxidation of phenols with chlorine dioxide or chlorine produces chlorinated aromatic intermediates before ring rupture. Oxidation of phenols with either chlorine dioxide or ozone produces oxidized aromatic compounds as intermediates which undergo ring rupture upon treatment with more oxidant and/or longer reaction times. In many cases, the same nonchlorinated, ringruptured aliphatic products are produced using ozone or chlorine dioxide. 

The reaction of ozone with an aromatic compound is considerably slower than the reaction with an alkene. Complete ozonolysis of one mole of benzene with workup under non-oxidative conditions will yield three moles of glyoxal. The selective ozonolysis of particular bonds in appropriate aromatic compounds is used in organic synthesis, for example in the synthesis of a substituted biphenyl 8 from phenanthrene 7 ... 

In addition to reactions with HO, tropospheric organic compounds may be oxidized by ozone (via ozonation of non-aromatic carbon/carbon double bonds, Atkinson 1990) and in some cases by reaction with nitrate radical, described below. Table I gives representative trace-gas removal rates for these three processes. In spite of these competing reactions, HO largely serves as... 

As the reaction temperature is increased, chemiluminescence is observed in the reactions of ozone with aromatic hydrocarbons and even alkanes. Variation of temperature has been used to control the selectivity in a gas chromatography (GC) detector [35], At room temperature, only olefins are detected at a temperature of 150°C, aromatic compounds begin to exhibit a chemiluminescent response and at 250°C alkanes respond, giving the detector a nearly universal response similar to a flame ionization detector (FID). The mechanisms of these reactions are complex and unknown. However, it seems likely that oxygen atoms produced in the thermal decomposition of ozone may play a significant role, as may surface reactions with 03 and O atoms. 

Synthetic operations involving ozonolysis lead to formation of aldehydes, ketones or carboxylic acids, as shown in Scheme 16, or to various peroxide compounds, as depicted in Scheme 7 (Section V.B.5), depending on the nature of the R to R substituents and the prevalent conditions of reaction no effort is usually made to isolate either type of ozonide, but only the final products. This notwithstanding, intermediates 276 and 278 are prone to qualitative, quantitative and structural analysis. The appearance of a red-brown discoloration during ozonization of an olefin below — 180°C was postulated as due to formation of an olefin-ozone complex, in analogy to the jr-complexes formed with aromatic compounds however, this contention was contested (see also Section V1I.C.2). 

If compounds already react very fast with ozone, the addition of hydrogen peroxide is nearly ineffective, which was shown by Brunet et al. (1984) in the case of benzaldehyde and phthalic acid. The functional groups on the aromatic ring are relatively reactive towards molecular ozone. The advantage of this process lies in the removal of compounds relatively non-reactive with ozone. It was shown that the oxidation of oxalic acid, which is often an end product in the case of molecular ozone reactions, was significantly accelerated with the addition of hydrogen peroxide. 

More recently, chemiluminescence detectors based on redox reactions have made possible the detection of many classes of compounds not detected by flame ionization. In the redox chemiluminescence detector (RCD), the effluent from the column is mixed with nitrogen dioxide and passed across a catalyst containing elemental gold at 200-400°C. Responsive compounds reduce the nitrogen dioxide to nitric oxide. The nitric oxide is reacted with ozone to give the chemiluminescent emission. The RCD yields a response from compounds capable of undergoing dehydrogenation or oxidation and produces sensitive emissions from alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, acids, amines, olifins, aromatic compounds, sulfides, and thiols. 

On the other hand, the indirect type of ozonation is due to the reactions of free radical species, especially the hydroxyl radical, with the organic matter present in water. These free radicals come from reaction mechanisms of ozone decomposition in water that can be initiated by the hydroxyl ion or, to be more precise, by the hydroperoxide ion as shown in reactions (4) and (5). Ozone reacts very selectively through direct reactions with compounds with specific functional groups in their molecules. Examples are unsaturated and aromatic hydrocarbons with substituents such as hydroxyl, methyl, amine groups, etc. [45,46],... 

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