Kinetics
The chemical kinetics of a radical reaction depend on all these individual reactions. In steady state the concentrations of initiating (I.) and terminating species T. are negligent and rate of initiation and rate of termination are equal. The overall reaction rate can be written as :
with a broken-order dependence of 1.5 with respect to the initiating species.
The reactivity of different compounds toward a certain radical is measured in so-called competition experiments. Compounds bearing carbon-hydrogen bonds react with radicals in the order primary < secondary < tertiary < benzyl < allyl reflecting the order in C-H bond dissociation energy
Many stabilizing effects can be explained as resonance effects, an effect specific to radicals is the captodative effect.
Read more about this topic: Free Radical Reaction