Nitration orientation

The trimesitylarsine complex with mercury(II) nitrate is a centrosymmetric dimer with bridging nitrate groups 12 the asymmetric unit consists of two independent half molecules, differing in nitrate orientation and the configuration of the trimesitylarsine... 

Once a likely Br0nsted acid site was determined from the above protocol, a number of acetyl nitrate orientations around the acid site were generated and optimized. The lowest energy orientation was chosen to study the reaction of acetyl nitrate with toluene. The toluene was placed close to the acetyl nitrate NO2 moiety for two scenarios electrophilic para attack and electrophilic ortho attack. The H-beta zeolite, acetyl nitrate, and toluene models were then optimized to give the reactant minima for subsequent transition state searches. The mechanism for the reactant, intermediate, and product minima and transition states for para and ortho toluene nitration were partially inspired by the mechanistic work of Olah and coworkers " and the woik of Silva and Nascimento" for the nitration of benzene in the gas phase and via formyl nitrate and a 5-T (pentameric) cluster carved from beta zeolite, respectively. From these minima, the appropriate transition states were found using the transition state algorithm described earlier to build potential energy profiles for the nitration of toluene by acetyl nitrate in the presence of the beta acid site catalyst. 

A brief account of aromatic substitution may be usefully given here as it will assist the student in predicting the orientation of disubstituted benzene derivatives produced in the different substitution reactions. For the nitration of nitrobenzene the substance must be heated with a mixture of fuming nitric acid and concentrated sulphuric acid the product is largely ni-dinitrobenzene (about 90 per cent.), accompanied by a little o-dinitrobenzene (about 5 per cent.) which is eliminated in the recrystallisation process. On the other hand phenol can be easily nitrated with dilute nitric acid to yield a mixture of ortho and para nitrophenols. It may be said, therefore, that orientation is meta with the... 

These systems nitrate aromatie eompounds by a proeess of electro-philie substitution, the eharacter of whieh is now understood in some detail ( 6.1). It should be noted, however, that some of them ean eause nitration and various other reactions by less well understood processes. Among sueh nitrations that of nitration via nitrosation is especially important when the aromatic substrate is a reactive one ( 4.3). In reaetion with lithium nitrate in aeetie anhydride, or with fuming nitrie aeid, quinoline gives a small yield of 3-nitroquinoline this untypieal orientation (ef. 10.4.2 ) may be a eonsequenee of nitration following nucleophilic addition. ... 

Further evidence that the nitronium ion was not the electrophile in the uncatalysed reaction, and yet became effective in the catalysed reaction, came from differences in the orientation of substitution. The nitration of chlorobenzene in the uncatalysed reaction yielded only 43 % of the para compound, whereas, when the catalysed reaction was made important by adding some nitric acid, the ratio of substitution was that usually observed in nitration involving the nitronium ion ( 5.3.4). In the case of the uncatalysed reaction however, the reaction was complicated by the formation of nitrophenols. 

Nitration using this reagent was first investigated, by Francis. He showed that benzene and some of its homologues bromobenzene, benzonitrile, benzoyl chloride, benzaldehyde and some related compounds, and phenol were mono-nitrated in solutions of benzoyl nitrate in carbon tetrachloride anilines would not react cleanly and a series of naphthols yielded dinitro compounds. Further work on the orientation of substitution associated this reagent with higher proportions of o-substitution than that brought about by nitric acid this point is discussed below ( 5.3.4). 

Biphenyl is a compound which raises problems as regards the orientation of nitration produced by different reagents. This compound is discussed later ( 10.1). 

Phenol. The change in the orientation of substitution into phenol as a result of the superimposition of nitrosation on nitration is a well-established phenomenon. In aqueous sulphuric acid it leads to a change from the production of 73 % of o-nitrophenol under nitrating... 

Phenylboronic acid. The orientation of nitration in phenylboronic acid is very susceptible to changes in the medium (table 5.8). The high proportion of o-substitution in acetic anhydride is not attributable to a specific o-reaction, for the nt -ratios of the last tabulated pair of results are not constant. The marked change in the ratio was considered to be due to the formation in acetic anhydride of a complex, as illustrated below, which is 0 -orienting and activated as a result of the -t-1 effect. This species need only be formed in a small concentration to overwhelm... 

TABLE 5.9 Orientation in the nitration of some benzylic compounds... 

If, on the other hand, the encounter pair were an oriented structure, positional selectivity could be retained for a different reason and in a different quantitative sense. Thus, a monosubstituted benzene derivative in which the substituent was sufficiently powerfully activating would react with the electrophile to give three different encounter pairs two of these would more readily proceed to the substitution products than to the starting materials, whilst the third might more readily break up than go to products. In the limit the first two would be giving substitution at the encounter rate and, in the absence of steric effects, products in the statistical ratio whilst the third would not. If we consider particular cases, there is nothing in the rather inadequate data available to discourage the view that, for example, in the cases of toluene or phenol, which in sulphuric acid are nitrated at or near the encounter rate, the... 

A familiar feature of the electronic theory is the classification of substituents, in terms of the inductive and conjugative or resonance effects, which it provides. Examples from substituents discussed in this book are given in table 7.2. The effects upon orientation and reactivity indicated are only the dominant ones, and one of our tasks is to examine in closer detail how descriptions of substituent effects of this kind meet the facts of nitration. In general, such descriptions find wide acceptance, the more so since they are now known to correspond to parallel descriptions in terms of molecular orbital theory ( 7.2.2, 7.2.3). Only in respect of the interpretation to be placed upon the inductive effect is there still serious disagreement. It will be seen that recent results of nitration studies have produced evidence on this point ( 9.1.1). 

Wheland intermediate (see below) as its model for the transition state. In this form it is illustrated by the case mentioned above, that of nitration of the phenyltrimethylammonium ion. For this case the transition state for -nitration is represented by (v) and that for p-substitution by (vi). It is argued that electrostatic repulsions in the former are smaller than in the latter, so that m-nitration is favoured, though it is associated rvith deactivation. Similar descriptions can be given for the gross effects of other substituents upon orientation. 

Similar difficulties arise in the nitrations of 2-chloro-4-nitroaniline and /)-nitroaniline. Consideration of the rate profiles and orientation of nitration ( 8.2.5) these compounds suggests that nitration involves the free bases. However, the concentrations of the latter are so small as to imply that if they are involved reaction between the amines and the nitronium ion must occur upon encounter that being so, the observed activation energies appear to be too high. The activation energy for the simple nitration of the free base in the case of/>-nitroaniline was calculated from the following equation ... 

It is the purpose of this and the following chapter to report the quantitative data concerning the relationship of structure to orientation and reactivity in aromatic nitration. Where data obtained by modern analytical methods are available they are usually quoted in preference to the results of older work. Many of the papers containing the latter are, however, noted in the brief discussion which is given of interpretations of the results. 

There have been many studies of the orientation of nitration in di- and poly-substituted derivatives of benzene, but in very few cases have... 

M.o. theory has had limited success in dealing with electrophilic substitution in the azoles. The performances of 7r-electron densities as indices of reactivity depends very markedly on the assumptions made in calculating them. - Localisation energies have been calculated for pyrazole and pyrazolium, and also an attempt has been made to take into account the electrostatic energy involved in bringing the electrophile up to the point of attack the model predicts correctly the orientation of nitration in pyrazolium. ... 

Ochiai and Okamoto showed that nitration of quinoline i-oxide in sulphuric acid at o °C gave 5- and 8-nitroquinoline i-oxides with a trace of the 4-isomer, but that at 60-100 °C 4-nitration became overwhelmingly dominant. The orientation depends not only upon temperature but also upon acidity, and kinetic studies (table 8.4 table 10.3) show that two processes are occurring the nitration of the free base (vil, R = O at C(4), favoured by low acidities and high temperatures, and the nitration of the cation (vil, R = OH), favoured by high acidities and low temperatures. ... 

As with cases mentioned earlier, Hiickel m.o. theory performs satisfactorily in predicting the orientation of nitration in these oxides, but again fails to reproduce their strong deactivation. ... 

The same orientation is found in the nitration of 2-methylbenzimi-dazole, whilst 5-nitro- and 2-methyl-5-nitrobenzimidazole are further nitrated at C(g). The acidity dependence of the rate of nitration of... 

From these results it appears that the 5-position of thiazole is two to three more reactive than the 4-position, that methylation in the 2-position enhances the rate of nitration by a factor of 15 in the 5-position and of 8 in the 4-position, that this last factor is 10 and 14 for 2-Et and 2-t-Bu groups, respectively. Asato (374) and Dou (375) arrived at the same figure for the orientation of the nitration of 2-methyl and 2-propylthiazole Asato used nitronium fluoroborate and the dinitrogen tetroxide-boron trifluoride complex at room temperature, and Dou used sulfonitric acid at 70°C (Table T54). About the same proportion of 4-and 5-isomers was obtained in the nitration of 2-methoxythiazole by Friedmann (376). Recently, Katritzky et al. (377) presented the first kinetic studies of electrophilic substitution in thiazoles the nitration of thiazoles and thiazolones (Table 1-55). The reaction was followed spec-trophotometrically and performed at different acidities by varying the... 

TABLE 1-53. ORIENTATION AND REACTTV-ITY RELATIVE TO BENZENE m THE NITRATION OF ALKYL-THIA20LES AT 70°C BY SUL-FONITRIC AQD (373)... 

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