Gas-Phase Structures of Ketene and Acetic Acid from Acetic Anhydride Using Very-High-Temperature Gas Electron Diffraction.

The gas-phase molecular structure of ketene has been determined using samples generated by the pyrolysis of acetic anhydride (giving acetic acid and ketene), using one permutation of the very-high-temperature (VHT) inlet nozzle system designed and constructed for the gas electron diffraction (GED) apparatus based at the University of Canterbury. The gas-phase structures of acetic anhydride, acetic acid, and ketene are presented and compared to previous electron diffraction and microwave spectroscopy data to show improvements in data extraction and manipulation with current methods. Acetic anhydride was modeled with two conformers, rather than a complex dynamic model as in the previous study, to allow for inclusion of multiple pyrolysis products. The redetermined gas-phase structure of acetic anhydride (obtained using the structure analysis restrained by ab initio calculations for electron diffraction method) was compared to that from the original study, providing an improvement on the description of the low vibrational torsions compared to the dynamic model. Parameters for ketene and acetic acid (both generated by the pyrolysis of acetic anhydride) were also refined with higher accuracy than previously reported in GED studies, with structural parameter comparisons being made to prior experimental and theoretical studies.