Heats of formation and hydrogenation of fused bicyclic benzene isomers: The use of Ring Conserving Isodesmic Reactions

Strain has been defined as a source of errors in the determination of heats of formations using bond separation reactions. In this work, we define Ring Conserving Isodesmic Reactions to conserve the strain. First a set of reference systems is defined to reproduce the different cyclic patterns. Those references are then used on bicyclohexadienes to evaluate the effect on the resulting heats of formation. In a last section, the successive heats of hydrogenation of the different systems are analyzed.