Free radical chemistry, themes

By about 1947 many of the major themes of free radical chemistry had emerged from this war-initiated polymer research data on structure and reactivity and establishment of the utility of competitive kinetics for determining relative rates of chain propagation steps in chain reactions by product analyses as I ve just described th first good rate constants for elementary steps in chain processes - here the first really reliable results were on vinyl acetate polymerization from Paul Bartlett s laboratory ( ) degradative chain transfer, first demonstrated by Bartlett and Altschul and showing how the length of kinetic... 

The major secondary sources of literature are listed in Table I. The single most important item is the two-volume compendium edited by Kochi 126). It will be noticed that the role of organic free radicals in transition metal chemistry, except for Co(II) derivatives, is a rather new area and constitutes a major theme of our article (Sections III-V). With regard to metal-centered radicals (Section II), we concentrate particularly on those that have considerable kinetic stability, e.g., Sn[CH(SiMe3)2].-i, another recent development 48). 

In the course of this lecture I have attempted to outline the development of radiation chemistry from its beginnings. The main historical theme has been the elucidation of the extent to which neutral free radicals as opposed to Ionic species contributed to the overall chemistry. Our present understanding leads to the view that the interplay between free radical and ionic processes is very dependent on the system being considered, particularly its dielectric properties and the presence, or absence, of solutes which can react with electrons or cations. 

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