Electrochemical Oxidation Synthesis Of Aryl Nitriles

Organic electrochemistry synthesis, which means the combination of electrochemical technique and organic synthesis, is an interdisciplinary subject involving organic synthesis, electrochemistry and physical chemistry, and it is also called organic electrosynthesis. During the process, electronic is used as green reagent to promote the reaction by electron gain and loss, oxidation and reducing. The main range of study of this subject contains the electronic of organic molecules or catalytic media transfer on the interface between "electrode and solvent", as well as the rules of the breakage of old bonds and the formation of new bonds and the conversion between chemical energy and electric energy.During decades, since the fast pace of the development of science, the worse and worse problems of environment and also the chasing of green chemistry, scientists are try their best to explore more solutions for mild, effective and easy post-processing. Different to traditional organic reaction, electric being as oxidant and reducing reagents can be more green, atom economic and can be controlled under room temperature, atmospheric pressure and whatever current and voltage you want. As a result, organic electrochemistry synthesis is a modern and novel technique to achieve sustainable development and the protection of environment.This paper mainly presents the electrochemical oxidation synthesis of aryl nitriles via green methods. The whole paper contains three parts and the1st part summarizes the history and latest achievements of organic electrochemistry synthesis. The2nd part reveals a green and efficient access to aryl nitriles from corresponding azides via an electrochemical anodic oxidation. The last part is to discuss our recent work on prepare and control the shape and size metallic tin.We take full use of organic electrosynthesis to simplify the synthesis of aryl nitriles. According to the original organic work, metals such as Ru, Rh, and Pd are popularly used as catalysts, or involve TBHP, DDQ as oxidant reagents to promote the transformation under high temperature and pressure or other hazard conditions. Even these previous work all achieved very good yields, they cannot avoid the using of poisonous and expensive metals and harsh working conditions. All these disadvantages in environmental protection and atom economy limit its popularity in chemistry industry. As for us, we explore a new approach to let electrochemical help with organic chemistry become friendly and green. We use an undivided cell equipped with platinum electrodes as both anode and cathode to realize the conversion of nitriles from aryl azides. What’s more, we only use two kinds of inorganic salts, K3PO4.3H2O and TBAB, and applying distilled water as mild solvent, which highly simplify the reaction system. The mechanism of this conversion is also very clear as there are many similar theories have been reported.At last, we tune the shape and try to control the characterization of metallic tin. Under the electrochemical conditions, we modify different concentration of SnCl2to form hollow sphere, star, rod and irregular polyhedron of metallic tin. In addition, we have found a polymer to work as stabilizer which can help assemble nano Sn whose diameter is around5nm.In general, we develop an efficient conversion of aryl nitriles by involving electronic technique in organic synthesis, which provides a new perspective in preparation this kind of organic material in more simple and green way.