The Concept of Protobranching and Its Many Paradigm Shifting Implications for Energy Evaluations

Abstract

Branched alkanes like isobutane and neopentane are more stable than their straight chain isomers, n‐butane and n‐pentane (by 2 and 5 kcal mol⁻¹, respectively). Electron correlation is largely responsible. Branched alkanes have a greater number of net attractive 1,3‐alkyl–alkyl group interactions, there are three such stabilizing 1,3 “protobranching” dispositions in isobutane, but only two in n‐butane. Neopentane has six protobranches but n‐pentane only three. Propane has one protobranch and is stabilized appreciably, by 2.8 kcal mol⁻¹, relative to methane and ethane. This value per protobranch also applies to the n‐alkanes and cyclohexane. Consequently, energy evaluations employing alkane reference standards, for example, of small ring strain and stabilizations due to conjugation, hyperconjugation, and aromaticity, should be corrected for protobranching, for example, by employing Pople's isodesmic bond separation reaction method. This reduces the ring strain of cyclopropane to 19.2 from the conventional 27.7 kcal mol⁻¹, while the stabilization energies of alkenes and alkynes due to hyperconjugation (5.5 and 7.7 kcal mol⁻¹ for propene and propyne) and conjugation (14.8 and 27.1 kcal mol⁻¹ for butadiene and butadiyne) are considerably larger than the traditional estimates. Widely diverging literature evaluations of benzene resonance energy all give ≈65 kcal mol⁻¹ after adjusting for conjugation, hyperconjugation, and protobranching “contaminations.” The BLW (block localized wavefunction) method, which localizes π bonds and precludes their interactions, largely confirms these stabilization estimates for hyperconjugation, conjugation, and aromaticity. Protobranching is seriously underestimated by theoretical computations at the HF and most DFT levels, which do not account for electron correlation satisfactorily. Such levels give bond separation energies, which can differ greatly from experimental values.