BIMOLECULAR REACTIONS OF DIENES AND POLYENES

Processes with gaseous reactants are excluded here. Due to the large compressibility of gases an increase of pressure (up to 1 kbar) leads essentially only to an increase of gas concentration, and hence to an acceleration of bimolecular processes in which gases are involved as reactants. The effect of pressure on a chemical reaction in compressed solution is largely determined by the volume of reaction (AV) and the volume of activation (AV ). It is not the purpose of this chapter to provide a complete survey of reactions of dienes and polyenes which have been investigated at elevated pressures. There are many excellent monographs (e.g. References 1-4) and reviews (e.g. References 5-16) on this topic which cover the literature up to early 1990. After a short introduction into the basic concepts necessary to understand pressure effects on chemical processes in compressed solutions, our major objective is to review the literature of the past ten years. 

Bimolecular ion/molecule reactions of dienes and polyenes have been extensively studied for several reasons. Some of them have been mentioned implicitly in the previous sections, that is, in order to structurally characterize the gaseous cations derived from these compounds. In this section, bimolecular reactivity of cationic dienes, in particular, with various neutral partners will be discussed, and some anion/molecule reactions will be mentioned also (cf Section IV). In addition, the reactions of neutral dienes with several ionic partners will also be discussed. Of this latter category, however, the vast chemistry of reactions of neutral dienes with metal cations and metal-centred cations will not be treated here. Several reviews on this topic have been published in the last decade178. 

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