Carbocations hydration

Further insight into the nature of the transition state for carbocation hydration comes from application of the two parameter Yukawa-Tsuno equation (Eq. 21). ... 

Carbocation intermediates are not involved m hydroboration-oxidation Hydration of double bonds takes place without rearrangement even m alkenes as highly branched as the following... 

This elimination reaction is the reverse of acid-catalyzed hydration, which was discussed in Section 6.2. Because a carbocation or closely related species is the intermediate, the elimination step would be expected to favor the more substituted alkene as discussed on p. 384. The El mechanism also explains the general trends in relative reactivity. Tertiary alcohols are the most reactive, and reactivity decreases going to secondary and primary alcohols. Also in accord with the El mechanism is the fact that rearranged products are found in cases where a carbocation intermediate would be expected to rearrange ... 

The rates of hydration of alkenes increase dramatically with increasing alkyl substitution (see table at left). This is usually attributed to the relative stabilities of carbocations formed as intermediates in the initial (and rate-hmiting) step of the reaction, e.g., for hydration of propene. 

Water adds to alkenes to yield alcohols, a process called hydration. The reaction takes place on treatment of the alkene with water and a strong acid catalyst (HA) by a mechanism similar to that of HX addition. Thus, protonation of an alkene double bond yields a carbocation intermediate, which reacts with water to yield a protonated alcohol product (ROH2+). Loss of H+ from this protonated alcohol gives the neutral alcohol and regenerates the acid catalyst (Figure 7.2). 

Mechanism of the acid-catalyzed hydration of an alkene to yield an alcohol. Protonation of the alkene gives a carbocation intermediate that reacts with water. 

In each mechanism above, the first step involves protonation of the alkene to form a carbocation. Then, in both cases, a nucleophile (either X or H2O) attacks the car-bocation to give a product. The difference between these two reactions is in the nature of the product. The first reaction above (hydrohalogenation) gives a product that is neutral (no charge). However, the second reaction above (hydration) produced a charged species. Therefore, one more step is necessary at the end of the hydration reaction— we must get rid of the positive charge. To do this, we simply deprotonate ... 

It was previously observed that with a catalytic amount of FeCls, benzylic alcohols were rapidly converted to dimeric ethers by eliminating water (Scheme 14). In the presence of an alkyne this ether is polarized by FeCls and generates an incipient benzylic carbocation. The nucleophilic attack of the alkyne moiety onto the resulting benzyl carbocation generated a stable alkenyl cation, which suffer the nucleophilic attack of water (generated in the process and/or from the hydrated... 

There are some special cases where tetrahedral intermediates are unusually stable there are three phenomena which lead to this stability enhancement. The first is an unusually reactive carbonyl (or imine) compound which is very prone to addition. An example of such a compound is trichoroacetaldehyde or chloral, for which the covalent hydrate can be isolated. A simple way to recognize such compounds is to think of the carbonyl group as a (very) stabilized carbocation, bearing an substituent. 

Alternatively one can make use of No Barrier Theory (NBT), which allows calculation of the free energy of activation for such reactions with no need for an empirical intrinsic barrier. This approach treats a real chemical reaction as a result of several simple processes for each of which the energy would be a quadratic function of a suitable reaction coordinate. This allows interpolation of the reaction hypersurface a search for the lowest saddle point gives the free energy of activation. This method has been applied to enolate formation, ketene hydration, carbonyl hydration, decarboxylation, and the addition of water to carbocations. ... 

Addition of a proton occurs to give the more-substituted carbocation, so addition is regioselective and in accord with Markovnikov s rule. A more detailed discussion of the reaction mechanism is given in Section 6.2 of Part A. Owing to the strongly acidic and rather vigorous conditions required to effect hydration of most alkenes, these conditions are applicable only to molecules that have no acid-sensitive functional groups. The reaction is occasionally applied to the synthesis of tertiary alcohols. 

The hydration of an alkene double bond under strongly acidic conditions is again a classical reaction that involves a carbocation intermediate, which often leads to various competing reaction products.27 The regiochemistry of the water addition follows the Markovnikov rule.28... 

The rate-determining step in the hydration mechanism is step 1 the formation of the carbocation => accounts for the Markovnikov addition of water to the double bond. 

Kinetic studies of stepwise hydration reactions of aikenes. This work has shown that carbocations with labile jff-CH bond(s) that are stabilized by an a-amino group,35-37 or by two a-thiol groups38 0 undergo preferential deprotonation to form the products of an elimination reaction (kp > ks, Scheme 1). 

Fig. 1 Free energy reaction coordinate profiles for hydration and isomerization of the alkene [2] through the simple tertiary carbocation [1+], The rate constants for partitioning of [1 ] to form [l]-OSolv and [3] are limited by solvent reorganization (ks = kteorg) and proton transfer (kp), respectively. For simplicity, the solvent reorganization step is not shown for the conversion of [1+] to [3], but the barrier for this step is smaller than the chemical barrier to deprotonation of [1 ] (kTtOTg > kp).

Fig. 2 Free energy reaction coordinate profiles for the stepwise acid-catalyzed hydration of an alkene through a carbocation intermediate (Scheme 5). (a) Reaction profile for the case where alkene protonation is rate determining (ks kp). This profile shows a change in rate-determining step as a result of Bronsted catalysis of protonation of the alkene. (b) Reaction profile for the case where addition of solvent to the carbocation is rate determining (ks fcp). This profile shows a change in rate-determining step as a result of trapping of the carbocation by an added nucleophilic reagent.

Values of Kadd for the addition of water (hydration) of alkenes to give the corresponding alcohols. These equilibrium constants were obtained directly by determining the relative concentrations of the alcohol and alkene at chemical equilibrium. The acidity constants pATaik for deprotonation of the carbocations by solvent are not reported in Table 1. However, these may be calculated from data in Table 1 using the relationship pA ik = pATR + logA dd (Scheme 7). 

The results of studies of the acid-catalyzed hydration of oxygen-, sulfur-, seleno-and nitrogen-substituted alkenes and the relevance of this work to partitioning of the corresponding carbocation intermediates (Chart 1) between deprotonation and nucleophile addition was reviewed in 1986.70. We present here a brief summary of this earlier review, along with additional discussion of recent literature. 

Different rate-determining steps are observed for the acid-catalyzed hydration of vinyl ethers (alkene protonation, ks kp) and hydration of enamines (addition of solvent to an iminium ion intermediate, ks increasing stabilization of a-CH substituted carbocations by 71-electron donation from an adjacent electronegative atom results in a larger decrease in ks for nucleophile addition of solvent than in kp for deprotonation of the carbocation by solvent. 

What is retained nowadays of the initial mechanism (Scheme 1) is the occurrence of a cationic intermediate. But bromine bridging is not general, and its magnitude depends mainly on the double bond substituents (Ruasse, 1990). For example, when these are strongly electron-donating, i.e. able to stabilize a positive charge better than bromine, / -bromocarbocations are the bromination intermediates. The flexibility of transition state and intermediate stabilization puts bromination between hydration via carbocations and sulfenylation via onium ions. 

Because of the absence of any obvious reference value, the p -value of — 3.1 is not readily discussed in terms of charge magnitude or brominebridging at the rate-limiting transition states. For alkene hydration, it is now accepted that the intermediates are carbocations (20). The corresponding structure-reactivity relationship (21) is obtained by using o and [Pg.244]

Ab initio MO calculations have been carried out for two carbocation-generating reactions the 6 nI reaction of protonated 1-phenylethanol (H2O leaving group) and the acid-catalysed hydration of styrene. Optimizations were done at the MP2/6-31G level. The 6 nI transition state lies half way between the reactant and the product with respect to the bond lengths, charge distribution, and secondary deuterium isotope effects. 

Since HCl will be completely dissociated in water, the electrophile in this case will be the hydronium ion, although the same carbocation will be produced. The reaction is completed by nucleophilic attack of water, followed by loss of a proton, thus regenerating the acid catalyst. The overall conversion thus becomes hydration of the alkene. This is an important industrial process, typically employing sulfuric acid, but it... 

---