| MadSci Network: Chemistry |
You are correct, isobutylene would be a likely byproduct if you had used a stronger base (sodium hydroxide) instead of bicarbonate to dry your tert- butyl chloride. This is an example of what is called an elimination reaction, where a base abstracts a hydrogen adjacent to a carbon bearing a good leaving group (in your case, chloride). The overall reaction is loss of HCl to form a new carbon-carbon pi bond.
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