Chemical Applications

 

Chemical Applications of Microwave Heating

 


 © G. Whittaker, 1994 & 2007. This work, or extracts from this work may be reproduced only with the written permission of the author.

 


Introduction

 Although reports of the potential of microwaves for chemical syntheses date back to at least 1981 and their application to polymers to 1967 it was only with the publication of several articles in 1986 that their full potential began to be explored. Since then, their chemical applications have been extended to almost all areas of chemistry, and have consequently been the subject of a number of excellent reviews. The aim of this text is to explore the variety of work which has been carried out in microwave induced chemistry.

 Microwave syntheses from a variety of fields are considered, with the exception of gas phase reactions. Gas phase microwave syntheses tend to rely on the use of microwave induced plasmas, predominantly in work to create diamond films. This category is judged to be outside the scope of this work, it will not be considered further.

 Unless stated to the contrary, the synthetic work described was carried out using microwave radiation at 2.450GHz.