• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.948-950
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• 2009

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.1335-1343
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• 2008

Theoretical studies on the un-catalyzed and catalyzed aminations of ketene with $NH_3$ and $(NH_3)_2$, respectively, were studied using MP2 and hybrid density functional theory of B3LYP at the 6-31+G(d,p) and 6- 311+G(3df,2p) basis sets in the gas phase and in benzene and acetonitrile solvents. In the gas phase reaction, the un-catalyzed mechanism was the same as those previously reported by others. The catalyzed mechanism, however, was more complicated than expected requiring three transition states for the complete description of the C=O addition pathways. In the un-catalyzed amination, rate determining step was the breakdown of enol amide but in the catalyzed reaction, it was changed to the formation of enol amide, which was contradictory to the previous findings. Starting from the gas-phase structures, all structures were re-optimized using the CPCM method in solvent medium. In a high dielectric medium, acetonitrile, a zwitterions formed from the reaction of $CH_2$=C=O with $(NH_3)_2$, I(d), exists as a genuine minimum but other zwitterions, I(m) in acetonitrile and I(d) in benzene become unstable when ZPE corrected energies are used. Structural and energetic changes induced by solvation were considered in detail. Lowering of the activation energy by introducing additional $NH_3$ molecule amounted to ca. −20 $\sim$ −25 kcal/mol, which made catalyzed reaction more facile than un-catalyzed one.

• Macromolecular Research
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.103-115
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• 2000

The structural changes viewed from the molecular level have been investigated for the isothermal crystallization phenomena of polyethylene (PE) and the solvent-induced crystallization phenomenon of syndiotactic polystyrene (sPS) glassy sample. The data, which were collected by the time-resolved measurements of Fourier-transform infrared spectra, Raman spectra, synchrotron-sourced small-angle X-ray scattering, wide-angle X-ray scattering, and so on, were combined together to extract the detailed structural information in these phase transition phenomena. In the case of PE, the isothermal crystallization from the melt to the orthorhombic form was found to occur via the conformationally-disordered trans chain form, followed by the formation of the lamellar stacking structure of regular orthorhombic-type crystals. In the case of sPS, the amorphous chains in the glassy sample were found to enhance the mobility through the interaction with the injected solvent molecules, which act as a trigger to cause the conformational ordering from the random coil to the regular T$_2$G$_2$-type helical form. The thus created short helical segments were found to grow into longer helices, which gathered together to form the crystallites, as revealed by the organized coupling of the infrared, Raman and X-ray scattering data.