Structure and Properties
Contrary to what its Lewis structure seems to predict, acetic anhydride, like many other acid anhydrides that are free to rotate, has experimentally been found to be aplanar. The pi system linkage through the central oxygen offers very weak resonance stabilization compared to the dipole-dipole repulsion between the two carbonyl oxygens. However, the energy barriers to bond rotation between each of the optimal aplanar conformations are quite low.
Like most acid anhydrides, the carbonyl carbon of acetic anhydride is a potent electrophile as the leaving group for each carbonyl carbon (a carboxylate) is a good electron-withdrawing leaving group. The internal asymmetry may contribute to acetic anhydride's potent electrophilicity as the asymmetric geometry makes one side of a carbonyl carbon more reactive than the other, and in doing so tends to consolidate the electropositivity of a carbonyl carbon to one side (see electron density diagram).
Read more about this topic: Acetic Anhydride
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