Thermochemical properties and contribution groups for ketene dimers and related structures from theoretical calculations.

This research's main goals were to analyze ketene dimers' relative stability and expand group additivity value (GAV) methodology for estimating the thermochemical properties of high-weight ketene polymers (up to tetramers). The CBS-Q multilevel procedure and statistical thermodynamics were used for calculating the thermochemical properties of 20 cyclic structures, such as diketenes, cyclobutane-1,3-diones, cyclobut-2-enones and pyran-4-ones, as well as 57 acyclic base compounds organized into five groups. According to theoretical heat of formation predictions, diketene was found to be thermodynamically favored over cyclobutane-1,3-dione and its enol-tautomeric form (3-hydroxycyclobut-2-enone). This result did not agree with old combustion experiments. 3-Hydroxycyclobut-2-enone was found to be the least stable dimer and its reported experimental detection in solution may have been due to solvent effects. Substituted diketenes had lower stability than substituted cyclobutane-1,3-diones with an increased number of methyl substituents, suggesting that cyclobutane-1,3-dione type dimers are the major products because of thermodynamic control of alkylketene dimerization. Missing GAVs for the ketene dimers and related structures were calculated through linear regression on the 57 acyclic base compounds. Corrections for non next neighbor interactions (such as gauche, eclipses, and internal hydrogen bond) were needed for obtaining a highly accurate and precise regression model. To the best of our knowledge, the hydrogen bond correction for GAV methodology is the first reported in the literature; this correction was correlated to MP2/6-31Gdagger and HF/6-31Gdagger derived geometries to facilitate its application. GAVs assessed by the linear regression model were able to reproduce acyclic compounds' theoretical thermochemical properties and experimental heat of formation for acetylacetone. Ring formation and substituent position corrections were calculated by consecutively replacing the GAVs regarding the 20 cyclic structures' thermochemical properties.