Electrolytic Reactions and Their Use in Organic Synthesis

It should also be added that electrochemical reactions often lead to products of unusual stereochemistry as compared to homogeneous reactions (see Sect. 7.2). 

Scaling up a reaction in the laboratory often presents unexpected problems, and probably every organic chemist has experience of this. With the recent development of continuously operating cells (Sect. 6.2) a fairly small device should easily handle large quantities of electrolyte and hence provide an attractive alternative to any chemical method. As an example, dissolving metal reductions, notoriously difficult and sometimes expensive to run on a large scale, could preferably be replaced by cathodic reductions in many cases. A recent survey of electrochemistry in Britain has produced a list of reactions, which deserve consideration from the industrial point of view 39  

Needless to say, electrolytic methods should also be considered if no chemical procedure for the preparation of a desired compound exists. Even a superficial knowledge of the principles of electroorganic chemistry, to be outlined in this book, is enough for attacking a synthetic problem from a different perspective. 

We shall now examine the different reaction types referred to above (Sect. 2.) to see what kinds of transformations are possible. Generally, the denotations given, substitution, addition, etc., do not have quite the same meaning as in conventional organic chemistry, as will become obvious from the following discussion. 

---