Recent Developments in Peroxy Radical Chemistry

摘要

Peroxy radicals are key intermediate species in oxidation processes of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds containing oxygen, nitrogen or halogens in the atmosphere. The increasing need of accurate kinetic and mechanistic data for modelling the atmospheric chemical processes has motivated a large amount of work during the last fifteen years, resulting in significant improvement of our knowledge of the reactivity of this class of radicals. Six reviews dealing specifically of this topic have been published during the last decade (Lesclaux, 1997; Lightfoot et al, 1992; Nielsen et al, 1997; Tyndall et al, 2001; Wallington et al, 1992; Wallington et al, 1997). In general, peroxy radicals exhibit fairly low reactivity, particularly towards molecular (closed shell) species and, as a result, combination reactions with themselves or with other radical (open shell) species are their most common reactions. The kinetics and mechanisms of such combination reactions of interest in atmospheric chemistry are examined in this overview.