Anharmonic Effect of the Unimolecular Dissociation of Ethyl Radical

The anharmonic and harmonic rate constants have been calculated for the unimolecular dissociation of ethyl radical using the method proposed by Yao and Lin (YL method) at both B3LYP/6‐311++G** and MP2/6‐311++G** levels. The different rate constants indicate that the results obtained from B3LYP and MP2 method are very close. The anharmonic and tunneling effect of the title reaction has also been examined. The comparison shows that, both in microcanonical and canonical systems, the anharmonic rate constants are higher than those for harmonic cases, especially in the case of high total energies and temperatures, which indicates that anharmonic effect of the unimolecular dissociation of ethyl into C₂H₄ and H is so significant that cannot be neglected. The tunneling effect is very small for the decomposition of C₂H₅ radical.