Talk:Homolysis (chemistry)

Causes of Homolytic Cleavage in Chemistry

There are many more reagents than those listed that are capable of initiating a homolytic cleavage or otherwise being involved with radical chemistry. Atmospheric oxygen is probably the best example; many chemists are aware of the slow reaction that occurs between any ether with hydrogens alpha to the ether oxygen and atmospheric oxygen. The process produces highly explosive organic peroxides, or even polymers of such compounds. It is, and always has been, a major hazard in the chemical industry in any situation where susceptible ethers find utility. It makes distillation, purification, and evaporation of ethers very dangerous. Waste handling of ethers is, also, a dangerous and regulated procedure in many cases. In fact, most ethers (especially diethyl ether) are supplied with radical scavenging compounds like butylatedhydroxytoluene (BHT), making it necessary for chemists to explicitly prepare/purify certain ethers before they are used in reactions or purifications/workups. Azo linkages can undergo homolytic cleavage, and one of the (previously; no longer due to explosive hazards) more widely used laboratory scale radical polymerization initiators, azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN), contains such a linkage. Various halogens and halogenated hydrocarbons readily cleave to form radical species of varying stability. These are the compounds that are responsible for the breakdown of ozone, and it is a series of radical reactions (some catalyzed by the halogenated species) that cause this breakdown, especially in the presence of nitrogen crystals. Various inorganic species, including a fairly wide variety of D-block metal species, are known to undergo a whole range of radical reactions in solution or upon surfaces. Sulfur compounds are also notorious for their radical chemistry and this very behavior has been utilized in the field of controlled living radical polymerization as catalytic chain transfer and inhibitor species that help chemists control the distribution of products in such a polymerization reaction.184.189.220.114 (talk) 06:11, 4 November 2012 (UTC)