Radicals chlorine atom relatively electrophilic

Similarly, carboxylic acid and ester groups tend to direct chlorination to the / and v positions, because attack at the a position is electronically disfavored. The polar effect is attributed to the fact that the chlorine atom is an electrophilic species, and the relatively electron-poor carbon atom adjacent to an electron-withdrawing group is avoided. The effect of an electron-withdrawing substituent is to decrease the electron density at the potential radical site. Because the chlorine atom is highly reactive, the reaction would be expected to have a very early transition state, and this electrostatic effect predominates over the stabilizing substituent effect on the intermediate. The substituent effect dominates the kinetic selectivity of the reaction, and the relative stability of the radical intermediate has relatively little influence. 

Halogenation, and particularly chlorination, unlike most radical reactions, is markedly influenced by the presence in the substrate of polar substituents this is because Cl, owing to the electronegativity of chlorine, is markedly electrophilic (c/. p. 314), and will therefore attack preferentially at sites of higher electron density. Chlorination will thus tend to be inhibited by the presence of electron-withdrawing groups, as is seen in the relative amounts of substitution at the four different carbon atoms in 1-chlorobutane (78) on photoehemically initiated chlorination at 35° ... 

Due to the highly exothermic nature of the process, the replacement of primary, secondary and tertiary hydrogens upon reaction with electrophilic fluorine atoms is not as selective as for other radicals. For example, early work by Tedder [30,34], showed that the order of selectivity follows the usual pattern, i. e. tert > sec > prim, but the relative selectivity of fluorine atoms is less than chlorine atoms (Table 2). 

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