The work described in this and the following paper is a continuation of that in parts I and II, devoted to elucidation of the mechanism of the reactions of methylene with chloroalkanes, with particular reference to the reactivities of singlet and triplet methylene in abstraction and insertion processes. The products of the reaction between methylene, prepared by the photolysis of ketene, and 1-chloropropane have been identified and estimated and their dependence on reactant pressures, photolysing wavelength and presence of foreign gases (oxygen and carbon monoxide) has been investigated. Both insertion and abstraction mechanisms contribute significantly to the over-all reaction, insertion being relatively much more important than with chloroethane. This type of process appears to be confined to singlet methylene. If, as seems likely, there is no insertion into C—Cl bonds under our conditions (see part IV), insertion into C2—H and C3—H bonds occurs in statistical ratio, approximately. On the other hand, the chlorine substituent reduces the probability of insertion into C—H bonds in its vicinity. As in the chloroethane system, both species of methylene show a high degree of selectivity in their abstraction reactions. We find that
k
S
Cl
/
k
S
H
>7.7,
k
T
Cl
/
k
T
H
< 0.14, where the
k
’s are rate constants for abstraction, and the super- and subscripts indicate the species of methylene and the type of atom abstracted, respectively. Triplet methylene is discriminating in hydrogen abstraction from 1-C
3
H
7
Cl, the overall rates for atoms attached to C1, C2, C3 being in the ratios 2.63:1:0.
Escaping undesired gas-phase chemistry: Microwave-driven selectivity enhancement in heterogeneous catalytic reactors
