Primary kinetic isotope effect in the gas phase photochlorination of ethyl chloride-1-d1
The abstraction of hydrogen/deuterium from CH3CHDCl by ground state chlorine atoms produced photolytically from Cl2 has been investigated at temperatures betwen 280 and 368 K. The relative rates for the internal competition[Formula: see text]are found to conform to an Arrhenius rate law:[Formula: see text]These data, taken together with the external competition results for the C2H5Cl/CH3CHDCl system, in conjunction with the competitive results using CH4 as a primary reference, have yielded the rate constants (cm3 s−1):[Formula: see text]The relatively weak primary kinetic isotope effect, kH/kD, decreases with increasing temperature from 1,855 at 280 K to 1.66 at 365 K. The results are compared with those obtained based on the BEBO method. While both the trend and the magnitude of the kinetic isotope effect are satisfactorily predicted, the activation energy is not.