Advantages - Microwave Synthesis

05/04/16 8:31 p.m.

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synthesis using laboratory microwave
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Advantages

Advantages of Microwave Heating

How does microwave heating work? Which solvents can be heated with microwave irradiation?
What are the advantages? This crash course introduces you to the most important and
interesting topics in microwave synthesis. Learn about the basics and the advantages of this
field of chemistry, gather helpful hints and read up on scientific microwave equipment.

Microwave vs. conventional heating

While conventional heating works by means of a heated surface which in turn heats the
reaction vessel content (Figure 3, a), microwave irradiation provides energy-efficient internal
heating by direct coupling of microwave energy with dipoles and/or ions present in the
reaction mixture (Figure 3, b).
This leads to effective, so-called "in-core" heating of the reaction mixture instead of the
vessel wall. This direct interaction results in extremely fast heating rates not reproducible
with conventional heating.

Figure 3: Simplified temperature distribution in a reaction vessel (a) heated under conventional conditions and (b) heated via microwave
irradiation.

What Microwaves provide:

1000-fold rate acceleration
Less by-products
Higher yields
Simplified work-up

Scientific microwave reactors vs. kitchen ovens

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Advantages - Microwave Synthesis

05/04/16 8:31 p.m.

In the early days of microwave synthesis, household microwave ovens were used in chemical laboratories. Although
nowadays dedicated instrumentation is available, there are still chemists who use kitchen microwave ovens for
scientific purposes. However, most major scientific journals no longer accept manuscripts wherein domestic ovens
have been described as heating sources, since there are serious scientific and safety-related arguments to be made
for using dedicated instrumentation.
Using dedicated microwave equipment instead of domestic kitchen microwave ovens has many scientific and
practical advantages:
Possibility of convenient solvent superheating
Higher temperatures
Considerably reduced overall process times
Higher yields and purer compounds
Excellent parameter control
Improved reproducibility
Great ease of use
Access to automated setups and parallel synthesis
Improved process efficiency
Time saved = costs saved
Possibility of stirring
Improved temperature homogeneity in reaction mixtures
Increased scientific validity of results
Continuous power output
Sophisticated reaction control
Safe and smooth processing
Intuitive user interface (state-of-the-art touchscreen)
Convenient programming and data management
Automatic data recording
Safety under high temperature/pressure conditions

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