Solvent is ubiquitous feature of modern industry and everyday life with the current usage of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) worldwide is around £ 4,000,000,000 per annum and is one among the heavily implicated in causing change to the global climate. Today’s chemist is well-aware of the global warming disaster and is prepared for designing the synthetic methodologies with high atom economy in evvironmental friendly solvnets. With an ever increasing focus on reducing the environmental impact of solvent releases on human health and the environment, the replacement of conventional, organic solvents with alternative compounds that are inherently benign has attracted much attention in both industry and academia.
Geen Solvents lead a way to a geen future!
Over the last ten years, Ionic liquids (ILs) are emerging as smart and excellent solvents, which are made of positive and negative ions , usually ther are liquid at room temperature. They offer significant properties such asnegligible vapor pressure, high thermal stability, lack of inflammability, decent solubility for organic, inorganic and organometallic compounds, and non-coordinating but good solvating ability. Apart from these features each IL shows unique chemical and physical property by proper varying its cation and anion.
Supercritical carbon dioxide and water are another two alternative compounds that are of particular interest because they are non-toxic non-flammable, readily available, and cheap. Although scCO2 has been successfully used in industry as a solvent for selective extraction, development of scCO2 as a reaction solvent has been less successful due to its limited salvation power for many organic reagents of interest. In addition scCO2 has generally been shown to reduce both the reaction reate and selectivity of many reactions when compared to conventional solvents. Unlike scCO2, water is known to significantly accelerate reaction rates and improve selectivities over that obtainable in conventional solvents. However, most organic compounds are insoluble in water which has limited its use as a reaction solvent for industrial- scale processes.
