Competitive Substituent Effects on the Reactivity of Aromatic Rings

We performed second order perturbation theory calculations of gas phase proton affinities for o, m, p-nitroaniline at all positions and attempted correlations of the thermodynamic stability of the products with several reactivity indices: inductive effects from resonance, partial charges, and frontier orbital related indices such as local nucleophilic and electron-donating powers, global hardness of the products, and the substituent push pull effect. All protonation reactions at ring positions are predicted to be exothermic. Resonance and charge analysis give inconsistent correlations with proton affinities, while the condensed nucleophilic Fukui function, electron-donating power, global hardness, and push pull effect show promising trends.