Friedel Crafts acylation alkylation

FRIEDEL - CRAFTS Alkylation-Acylation Alkylation or acylation ol aromatic compounds by means of alryl halides, alcohols.alkenes, acyl halides in the presence of Lewis acids... 

Ualike the multiple substitutions that often occur in Friedel-Crafts alkylations, acylations never occur more than once on a ring because the product acyl-benzene is less reactive than the nonacylated starting material. We ll account for this reactivity difference in the next section. 

Tetralone 31 could also be synthesized much more efficiently by employing a chemoselective ketone reduction of 32 to give the lactone 33. A double Friedel-Crafts alkylation/acylation sequence employing a variety of Lewis or protic acids and benzene gave the tetralone 31 directly. Triflic acid and HF produced the highest yields of tetralone, presumably through the intermediacy of the diaryl acid 34 (Scheme 6)... 

Electrophilic Aromatic Substitution Reactions. Friedel-Crafts alkylation, acylation, and the Vilsmeier-Haack formylation, shown below, are excellent reactions for the synthesis of substituted aromatic compounds. 

It should be noted that the Friedel-Crafts acylation differs from the Friedel-Crafts alkylation (compare Sections IV,3-4 and discussion preceding Section IV,1) in one important respect. The alkylation requires catal3d.ic quantities of aluminium chloride, but for acylation a molecular equivalent of aluminium chloride is necessary for each carbonyl group present in the acylating agent. This is because aluminium chloride is capable of forming rather stable complexes with the carbonyl group these complexes probably possess an oxonium... 

Because acylation of an aromatic ring can be accomplished without rearrangement it is frequently used as the first step m a procedure for the alkylation of aromatic compounds by acylation-reduction As we saw m Section 12 6 Friedel-Crafts alkylation of ben zene with primary alkyl halides normally yields products having rearranged alkyl groups as substituents When a compound of the type ArCH2R is desired a two step sequence IS used m which the first step is a Friedel-Crafts acylation... 

Neither Friedel-Crafts acylation nor alkylation reactions can be earned out on mtroben zene The presence of a strongly deactivating substituent such as a nitro group on an aromatic ring so depresses its reactivity that Friedel-Crafts reactions do not take place Nitrobenzene is so unreactive that it is sometimes used as a solvent m Friedel-Crafts reactions The practical limit for Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions is effectively a monohalobenzene An aromatic ring more deactivated than a mono halobenzene cannot be alkylated or acylated under Friedel-Crafts conditions... 

Other typical electrophilic aromatic substitution reactions—nitration (second entry) sul fonation (fourth entry) and Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation (fifth and sixth entnes)—take place readily and are synthetically useful Phenols also undergo elec trophilic substitution reactions that are limited to only the most active aromatic com pounds these include mtrosation (third entry) and coupling with diazomum salts (sev enth entry)... 

Of the many methods which have been published so far for the substitution of existing crowns, probably the most straightforward are Friedel-Crafts alkylation or acylation reactions. Cygan, Biernat and Chadzynski have reported the successful di-t-butylation of dibenzo-24-crown-8 using t-butanol as alkylating agent s . The crown was heated at 100° for 4 h in the presence of excess t-butanol and 85% phosphoric acid. The product was obtained as a crystalline (mp 52—74°) solid in 93% yield. The alkylated crowns are presumably a mixture of isomers substituted once in each ring as illustrated in Eq. (3.14). 

An important difference between Friedel-Crafts alkylations and acylations is that acyl cations do not rearrange. The acyl group of the acyl chloride or acid anhydride is transfened to the benzene ring unchanged. The reason for this is that an acyl cation is so strongly stabilized by resonance that it is more stable than any ion that could conceivably arise from it by a hydride or alkyl group shift. 

---