Mechanistic Investigations of Epoxide Aminolysis in Microreactors at High Temperatures and Pressures

A continuous-flow microreactor is applied for a kinetic study of a model β-amino alcohol formation by epoxide aminolysis. A large number of experiments are performed in a short time with minimal reagent consumption. The kinetics of formation of secondary aminolysis between starting epoxide and pr...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zaborenko, Nikolay, Bedore, Matthew W., Jamison, Timothy F., Jensen, Klavs F.
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Chemical Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Chemical Society 2013
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77156
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7192-580X
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8601-7799
Description
Summary:A continuous-flow microreactor is applied for a kinetic study of a model β-amino alcohol formation by epoxide aminolysis. A large number of experiments are performed in a short time with minimal reagent consumption. The kinetics of formation of secondary aminolysis between starting epoxide and product are decoupled from the primary synthesis, constructing a complete model for desired product formation. The activation energy for the formation of desired product is observed to be higher than those for regioisomer formation and for secondary aminolysis, indicating that increasing temperature improves selectivity in addition to accelerating the reaction. A set of optimized conditions is then selected for best reaction performance, and a scaled-up process is performed, demonstrating improvement on a meso-scale.