Xylylenes, formation

A particularly useful property of the PX monomer is its enthalpy of formation. Conventional means of obtaining this value, such as through its heat of combustion, are, of course, excluded by its reactivity. An experimental attempt was made to obtain this measure of chemical reactivity with the help of ion cyclotron resonance a value of 209 17 kJ/mol (50 4 kcal/mol) was obtained (10). Unfortunately, the technique suffers from lack of resolution in addition to experimental imprecision. It is perhaps better to rely on molecular orbital calculations for the formation enthalpy. Using a semiempirical molecular orbital technique, which is tuned to give good values for heat of formation on experimentally accessible compounds, the heat of formation of /5-xylylene has been computed to be 234.8 kj/mol (56.1 kcal/mol) (11). 

Manufacture. For the commercial production of DPXN (di-/)-xylylene) (3), two principal synthetic routes have been used the direct pyrolysis of -xylene (4, X = Y = H) and the 1,6-Hofmaim elimination of ammonium (HNR3 ) from a quaternary ammonium hydroxide (4, X = H, Y = NR3 ). Most of the routes to DPX share a common strategy PX is generated at a controlled rate in a dilute medium, so that its conversion to dimer is favored over the conversion to polymer. The polymer by-product is of no value because it can neither be recycled nor processed into a commercially useful form. Its formation is minimised by careful attention to process engineering. The chemistry of the direct pyrolysis route is shown in equation 1 ... 

In 1972, Vogtle and Zuber condensed 1,2-dibromomethylbenzene (xylylene dibromide) with another xylylene unit, 1,2-dihydroxymethylbenzene. The result was formation of the macrocyclic tetraether (40% yield, mp 194°) shown in Eq. (3.19). The... 

In 1995 Vanderzande et al. [89] published a novel, modified Gilch procedure to unsubstituted PPV 60 starting from l-chloromethyl-4-(alkylsulfinyl)methyl-benzenes (68). The initial step, elimination of HCl with NaH as a strong base in NMP or DMF, leads to the formation of the sulfinyl-substituted 1,4-xylylene... 

Figure 5.3. Formation of o- and p-xylylene by deprotonation of benzyl cations.

Hehre and co-workers have used this approach for the investigation of biradicals and other reactive neutral molecules. For example, by using the bracketing approach, they were able to determine the proton affinities of o- and p-xylylene (o- and p-quinodimethane (lo and Ip) Figure 5.3), from which they were able to determine the enthalpies of formation of the reactive, Kekule molecules. They found the proton affinity of the meta isomer to be too high to be measured directly by bracketing, but were able to assign a lower limit, and subsequently a lower limit to the enthalpy of formation of the m-xylylene diradicals. 

An additional notable mode of the reactivity of these quinone methide complexes is formation of metal stabilized p- and o-xylylenes.10... 

Although 1, -elimination of o xylene polyhalides with sodium iodide, zinc, copper, or iron metal is a fundamental method for the formation of o-xylylene intermediates, it is difficult to carry out the reaction under mild conditions such as at room temperature. o Trimethylsilylmethyl)-benzyltrimethylammonium halides were devised for this purpose and were shown to generate the o-xylylene at room temperature. However, we have successfully generated o-xylylene at room temperature by the reaction of a, 0,-dibromo o-xylene with metallic nickel(51). The Diels-Alder reaction of... 

Let us now turn to the ring-contracted xylylene 3,4-dimethylenecyclobutene (121). Does Roth s preferred enthalpy of formation value of 336 kJmol-1 look plausible In the absence of both special strain and resonance energy contributions, the difference of the... 

Attempts were made not only to find an alternative way to replace dimer and to deposit high-quality poly(tetrafluoro-p-xylylene) film, but also to eliminate the dibromide as the precursor because of the difficulty of synthesis. Therefore, the deposition of poly(tetrafluoro-p-xylylene) film by using hexafluoro-p-xylene as the precursor instead of dibromotetrafluoro-p-xylene was tried. However, no polymer film was deposited on the wafer. Effort was expanded and other metal reagents such as nickel or copper were used to react with l,4-bis(trifluoromethyl)-benzene to generate a,a,a, a -tetrafluoro-p-xylylene to deposit poly(tetrafluoro-p-xylylene) film. However, the result showed that no film was deposited, which was not unexpected, because a C—X bond that is weaker than C—F bonding might be necessary to initiate the formation of the desired intermediate. 

Hydrolysis of optically pure bromide 100 a in dioxane/water gives the optically pure alcohol. This is consistent with the transannular p-xylylene ring participating in carbonium ion formation only through tz-g charge delocalization (iz-c resonance) of the type 104 rather than by direct participation in replacement of bromide via a transannularly bridged ion such as 102a. In the latter case, racemization would be expected to take place ... 

The formation of the heterocycle 1 from the xylylene-bis-phosphonium salt 2 and PCI3 proceeds via a detectable intermediate 3 in a cascade of condensation reactions that is terminated by spontaneous heterolysis of the last remaining P-Cl bond in a cyclic bis-ylide-substituted chlorophosphine formed (Scheme 1) [15]. The reaction scheme is applicable to an arsenic analogue of 1 [15] and to bis-phosphonio-benzophospholides with different triaryl-, aryl-alkyl- and aryl-vinyl-phosphonio groups [16, 18, 19], but failed for trialkylphosphonio-substituted cations here, insufficient acidity prohibited obviously quantitative deprotonation of the phosphonium salts, and only mixtures of products with unreacted starting materials were obtained [19]. The cations were isolated as chloride or bromide salts, but conversion of the anions by complexation with Lewis-acids or metathesis was easily feasible [16, 18, 19] and even salts with organometallic anions ([Co(CO)4] , [CpM(CO)3] (M=Mo, W) were accessible [20]. 

Whether the formation of poly(p-xylylene) should be included in this chapter is not clear. Decisive data are not available to indicate the classification of this polymerization as a step or chain reaction. The formation of high polymer occurs instantaneously when p-xyly-lene contacts the cool surface, precluding the evaluation of polymer molecular weight versus conversion. Also, the mode of termination for this reaction is unknown. 

One aspect of the polymerization that is well established is the initiation step when di-p-xylylene is pyrolyzed. An alternate initiation mode involving the direct formation of the diradical LV from LIII by cleavage of only one of the two CH2—CH2 bonds is ruled out from experiments with monosubstituted di-p-xylylenes. When acetyl-di-p-xylylene is pyrolyzed and the pyrolysis vapor led through successive condensation surfaces at temperatures of 90 and 25°C, respectively, the result is the formation of two different polymers neither of which is poly(acetyl-di-p-xylylene). Pyrolysis yields acetyl-p-xylylene and p-xylylene... 

An alternative polymerization mechanism and polymer architecture has been proposed by Kirchhoff [1, 2, 3], Tan and Arnold [77], By this mechanism, polybenzocyclobutenes which do not contain reactive sites of unsaturation are proposed to polymerize by the 1,4 addition of the o-quinodimethane intermediates to give a substantially linear poly(o-xylylene) structure. Since the monomers all contain at least two benzocyclobutene units the net result of this reaction will to a first approximation be a ladder type polymer as shown in Fig. 17. The formation of a true ladder polymer however would require that all... 

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