In the past few years, heating and driving chemical transformations by microwave energy has been an increasingly popular theme in the scientific community. This non-classical heating technique has slowly progressed from a laboratory curiosity to an established technique now heavily used in both academia and industry. The efficiency of microwave irradiation in dramatically reducing reaction times (from days and hours to minutes and seconds) and improving product purities or material properties are just two of the many advantages inherent to this technology.We have recently developed technology that allows mimicking the results obtained using microwave dielectric heating in dedicated microwave instruments by a novel reactor system that does not involve any microwave irradiation. A wide selection of chemical transformations was evaluated in this instrument and the results compared with the data obtained via standard sealed vessel microwave chemistry. In practically all of the studied examples identical results were obtained, comparing experiments that involved genuine microwave chemistry with experiments in the new reactor. The details of this technology and several case studies will be presented.

"Microwave chemistry" without microwaves

246th National Meeting (2013)

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