Greening Wittig Reactions: Solvent-Free Synthesis of Ethyl frans-Ginnamate and frans-3-(9-Anthryt)-2-Propenoic Acid Ethyl Ester

摘要

Green experiments for undergraduate organic chemistry laboratories are of major importance. Besides providing a safer lalioratory setting for students and reducing environmental pollution, green chemistry carries an educational message. When a green experiment is presented to students together with its "non-green" alternative, it can inspire students to seek out green chemistry solutions when working in a future scientific career. Green chemistry experiments for organic undergraduate labs have been developed (1, 2); however, expanding the repertoire of reactions is highly desirable. We feel that a useful approach for the development of new green chemistry experiments is to design green alternatives to existing experiments. Good candidates are experiments that have been published in this Journal as they are likely being used in schools and therefore will be easier for instructors to adopt the alternative green procedure. Here we present two examples for using this approach to create solvent-free alternatives for conventional Wittig reactions.