Your question is unclear. Are you referring to oxidation of ethylene using ozone, or oxidizing agents such as permanganate or and dichromate ion? If you are referring to the mechanism of combustion of ethylene in an oxygen atmosphere, or the flame combustion of any hydrocarbon for that matter, you are in for some very complicated processes! That sounded interesting, and I had a little extra time this afternoon, so I did some exploring on the Internet! For example:
"Theoretical kinetic models have been developed for practical combustion processes, basically for combustion of hydrogen and of methane, but the mechanism is very complex, with tens of elementary species and hundreds of elementary reactions. For hydrocarbons, the two controlling steps seem to be the formation of molecular hydrogen from hydrogen radicals (e.g. CH4 + H --> CH3 + H2) and the consumption of molecular oxygen by combination with hydrogen radicals (H + O2 --> HO2)." (From http://imartinez.etsin.upm.es/bk3/c15/Combustion%20Kinetics.htm)
We would expect that the mechanism will depend on the temperature, method of ignition, and perhaps concentrations as well.
As far as what happens first, here is another quote from http://imartinez.etsin.upm.es/bk3/c15/Combustion%20Kinetics.htm: "Combustion reactions generally start with the generic initiation step RH + O2 --> R + HO2, where R is a hydrocarbon radical (e.g. CH4 + O2 --> CH3 + HO2)." Perhaps ethylene combustion is initiated this way also.
In my keyword searches I noticed some sites about combustion with special CHEMKIN data files (requiring the CHEMKIN program, not free, to view) which may model a mechanism, but I couldn't tell for sure.
If you had another oxidation reaction in mind, let me know!
Steve
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