Overall kinetics of oxygen consumption

The loss of oxygen during an oxidation reaction is the result of a complex set of reactions. In the simplest situation where radicals are introduced into the system at a constant rate, such as by thermal decomposition of a free radical source, and where loss of radicals occurs upon every interaction of two R02, the overall scheme is 

When Ri is small compared with the first term, the simple and familiar relation 

In cases where e 1 or the chain length is long (J 0/J i 20), the second term in the equation may be neglected. 

For many hydrocarbons, a significant fraction of the interactions of R02 produce RO- [step (29)] and RO also propagate [step (31)] with consumption of oxygen 

Thus the termination rate coefficient is akx and where a is 0.2, much of RH can be converted to alcohol rather than hydroperoxide. In this more general case 

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