A systematic study on the kinetics of H-shift reactions in pristine acyl peroxy radicals

A series of acyl peroxy radical H-shifts were systematically studied using computational approaches. Acyl peroxy radicals were categorized into small- (ethanal-pentanal), medium- (hexanal and heptanal) and large-sized (octanal and nonanal) molecules. The H-shifts spanning from 1,4 to 1,9 were inspected for each studied system. For all acyl peroxy radicals, it is the combination of barrier heights and quantum mechanical tunneling that explains the yield of the peracid alkyl radical product. We used the ROHF-ROCCSD(T)-F12a/VDZ-F12//ωB97X-D/aug-cc-pVTZ level of theory to estimate the barrier heights and the subsequent rate coefficients with the exception of the smallest acyl peroxy radical ethanal, for which MN15 density functional was applied. The estimated multiconformer H-shift rate coefficients were found to be in the range of 10⁻² s⁻¹ to 10⁻¹ s⁻¹ for the fastest H-migrations. The determined rates imply that these H-shift reactions are often competitive with other RO₂ loss processes and should be considered as a path to functionalization in modelling not only rural but also urban air quality.