Synthesis and Applications
Abstract
Gas-phase pyrolysis is a special synthetic method that is usually clean, convenient, and efficient, and that has advantages over other synthetic methods for accomplishing the same goals. Flow gas-phase pyrolysis has long been used to provide a very powerful and useful alternative methodology in synthetic organic chemistry. Organic chemists have been performing flash vacuum pyrolysis reactions with the aim of synthesizing new compounds and/or to study reactive intermediates. This chapter explores the wide use of gas-phase pyrolysis reactions as a valuable alternative and environmentally friendly synthetic strategy in which waste is reduced or eliminated. An added advantage is that this technique is effectively free from solvation, hydrogen bonding, and protonation effects common in solution reactions. Gas-phase pyrolysis reactions offer important routes for novel heterocyclization and selective synthesis. The chapter describes various pyrolytic reactions that involve loss of thermodynamically stable small gaseous fragments – HX, CO, CO2, N2 – leading to interesting organic compounds.