Hydrogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons: isomerism and aromaticity
Paula Pla1, Yang Wang2, Fernando Martín3
1Departamento de Química, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Módulo 13, 28049 Madrid, Spain. manuel.alcami@uam.es.
Abstract:
A simple model, based on connectivity (adjacency) matrices, is introduced to study the relative stability of hydrogenated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (HPAHs). The model allows us to consider a very large number of isomeric structures for HPAHs of variable size and degree of hydrogenation, by taking into account the different positions available in each hydrogenation step. The validity of our approach is demonstrated by comparing, for a few selected cases, with the predictions of Density Functional Theory calculations. We have found that aromaticity is the main factor governing the relative stability of HPAH isomers and that the most stable structures are in general those containing the maximum possible number of non-hydrogenated rings.
Related Concept Videos
Aromatic Hydrocarbon Cations: Structural Overview
Removing one hydrogen from the intervening CH2 group...
Aromatic Hydrocarbon Anions: Structural Overview
Due to the absence of continuous...
Criteria for Aromaticity and the Hückel 4n + 2 Rule
For the first time, Eric Hückel, a German chemical physicist, derived a set of structural features for a compound to be classified as aromatic. This is now known as Hückel’s rule or the 4n +...
Stereoisomerism of Cyclic Compounds
Five-Membered Heterocyclic Aromatic Compounds: Overview
Constitutional Isomers of Alkanes
The linear isomer of an alkane is prefixed by the term “n”; hence a linear isomer of pentane is known as n-pentane. Based on the type of branching, some of the...


