Dissociation Chemistry of 3-Oxetanone in the Gas Phase

3-Oxetanone is a strained cyclic molecule which plays an important role in synthetic chemistry. A few studies exist in the literature about the equilibrium properties of this molecule and the dissociation patterns of substituted 3-oxetanones. For the unsubstituted 3-oxetanone, formation of ketene (CH₂CO) and formaldehyde (HCHO) was considered to be the major dissociation pathway. In a recent work, pyrolysis products of 3-oxetanone molecule in the gas phase were investigated by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and photoionization mass spectrometry. In this study, an additional dissociation channel forming ethylene oxide (c-C₂H₄O) and carbon monoxide CO was reported. In the present work, gas phase dissociation chemistry of 3-oxetanone was investigated by electronic structure theory, ab initio classical chemical dynamics simulations, and Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel-Marcus (RRKM) rate constant calculations. The barrier height for the ethylene oxide channel was found to be much higher than the ketene pathway. The dynamics simulations were performed at three different total energies, viz., 150, 200, and 300 kcal/mol, and multiple reaction pathways and varying branching ratios observed. A new dissociation channel involving a ring-opened isomer of ethylene oxide was identified in the simulations. This pathway has a lower energy barrier and was dominant in our dynamics simulations.