Apolar Liquids

In a Lewis-acid catalysed Diels-Alder reaction, the first step is coordination of the catalyst to a Lewis-basic site of the reactant. In a typical catalysed Diels-Alder reaction, the carbonyl oxygen of the dienophile coordinates to the Lewis acid. The most common solvents for these processes are inert apolar liquids such as dichloromethane or benzene. Protic solvents, and water in particular, are avoided because of their strong interactions wifti the catalyst and the reacting system. Interestingly, for other catalysed reactions such as hydroformylations the same solvents do not give problems. This paradox is a result of the difference in hardness of the reactants and the catalyst involved... 

Fig. 10. A schemalic Zisman plot for a given solid specimen. When the cosine of the static advancing contact angle is plotted against the surface tension for a series of apolar liquids against a test solid, a straight line results. Its extrapolation to cost = 1 yields the critical surface tension of the solid.

Such equations are generally successful only for the case of apolar liquids and solids, for which = 1, ys = y and yc = y, giving ... 

Thus apolar probe liquids of sufficiently high surface tension to yield finite contact angles against many surfaces are especially valuable for this purpose. Popular examples of these include diiodomethane, with a surface tension of 50.8 mN/m at 23°C, and a-bromonaphthalene, with a surface tension of 44.4 mN/m at the same temperature. One should be cautioned, however, that both are sufficiently volatile that the 7re-effects may not be negligible with their use. 

Liquid membranes can be constituted by liquid chiral selectors used directly [170] or by solutions of the chiral molecules in polar or apolar solvents. This later possibility can also be an advantage since it allows the modulation of the separation con-... 

The conformity to laws of adsorption, in particular their thermodynamic fundamentals, is independent of whether a water-air or a water-apolar oil interface is considered, provided that the surfactant is soluble only in one phase. If the oil phase in a liquid two-phase system is apolar, this condition is valid for many surfactants. Thus, all surfactants with an adequate solubility in water are almost insoluble in the hydrocarbon phase. If this condition is not met, e.g., in the system water-amyl alcohol, the thermodynamically based adsorption isotherms are more complicated to set up [39]. 

Acid ester phosphates with an alkyl chain up to C6 have little solubility whereas neutralized esters are soluble in water. In ethanol and isopropanol most of phosphoric acid esters and their salts are soluble. If the products are based on ethoxylated alcohols their solubility in water will increase as the degree of ethoxylation increases. The solubility in organic solvents like gasoline, benzene, perchlorethylene, and other apolar liquids recedes with an increase in the degree of ethoxylation but are increased by a higher alkyl chain. 

Water in its supercritical state has fascinating properties as a reaction medium and behaves very differently from water under standard conditions [771]. The density of SC-H2O as well as its viscosity, dielectric constant and the solubility of various materials can be changed continuously between gas-like and liquid-like values by varying the pressure over a range of a few bars. At ordinary temperatures this is not possible. For instance, the dielectric constant of water at the critical temperature has a value similar to that of toluene. Under these conditions, apolar compounds such as alkanes may be completely miscible with sc-H2O which behaves almost like a non-aqueous fluid. 

The diastereoselectivity of the cycloaddition of cyclopentadiene with methyl acrylate in SC-CO2 at 40 °C and subcritical liquid CO2 at 22 °C is practically the same endojexo = 75 25 and 76 24 respectively) and is comparable to that found in hydrocarbon solvents (73 27 and 75 25 in heptane and cyclohexane, respectively). This shows that CO2, in these states, behaves like an apolar solvent with very low polarizability [82]. 

An example of a /zctcro-Diels-Alder reaction in SC-CO2 is the cycloaddition of anthracene with 4-phenyl-1,2,4-triazoline-3,5-dione, carried out at 40 °C and at a pressures between 75 and 216 bar [86]. The rate constant increases with decreasing pressure and the highest reactivity was observed at the critical pressure. The value of the rate constant at the critical pressure was higher than that observed in liquid CHCI3 and MeCN at the same temperature. At higher pressures, the rate is slower than that in the polar solvents, which reflects the apolar nature of SC-CO2 as a solvent. 

An enormous literature has been produced in recent decades in the field of molecular aggregation of amphiphilic molecules in liquid systems, emphasizing the extremely wide variety of accessible structures and dynamics. Among these molecular aggregates, in this chapter our attention will be restricted to those formed by some amphiphilic molecules (surfactants) in apolar solvents called reversed micelles [1]. 

Ionic, polar, apolar, and amphiphilic molecules can coexist in the same liquid system, frequently coming in contact as a consequence of the micellar dynamics and of the large interfacial area between different domains (a typical value of the interfacial area is about 100 m /cm ). 

Moreover, stable liquid systems made up of nanoparticles coated with a surfactant monolayer and dispersed in an apolar medium could be employed to catalyze reactions involving both apolar substrates (solubilized in the bulk solvent) and polar and amphiphilic substrates (preferentially encapsulated within the reversed micelles or located at the surfactant palisade layer) or could be used as antiwear additives for lubricants. For example, monodisperse nickel boride catalysts were prepared in water/CTAB/hexanol microemulsions and used directly as the catalysts of styrene hydrogenation [215]. 

When an organic phase is added to the medium, transfer of a poorly water-soluble organic component from organic to aqueous phase is observed across the liquid-liquid interface. A sparingly water-soluble substrate may make up the organic phase, or be dissolved in an apolar organic solvent. This can affect the transfer over the organic-aqueous interface. 

Biocatalysis localization in the biphasic medium depends on physicochemical properties of the reactants. When all the chemical species involved in the reaction are hydro-phobic, catalysis occurs at the liquid-liquid interface. However, when the substrate is hydrophobic (initially dissolved in the apolar phase) and the product is hydrophilic (remains in the aqueous phase), the reaction occurs in the aqueous phase [25]. The majority of biphasic systems use sparingly water-soluble substrates and yield hydrophobic products therefore, the aqueous phase serves as a biocatalyst container [34,35] [Fig. 2(a)]. Nevertheless, in some systems, one of the reactants (substrate or product) can be soluble in the aqueous phase [23,36-38] (Fig. 2(b), (c)). 

Reinitzer discovered liquid crystallinity in 1888 the so-called fourth state of matter.4 Liquid crystalline molecules combine the properties of mobility of liquids and orientational order of crystals. This phenomenon results from the anisotropy in the molecules from which the liquid crystals are built. Different factors may govern this anisotropy, for example, the presence of polar and apolar parts in the molecule, the fact that it contains flexible and rigid parts, or often a combination of both. Liquid crystals may be thermotropic, being a state of matter in between the solid and the liquid phase, or they may be lyotropic, that is, ordering induced by the solvent. In the latter case the solvent usually solvates a certain part of the molecule while the other part of the molecule helps induce aggregation, leading to mesoscopic assemblies. The first thermotropic mesophase discovered was a chiral nematic or cholesteric phase (N )4 named after the fact that it was observed in a cholesterol derivative. In hindsight, one can conclude that this was not the simplest mesophase possible. In fact, this mesophase is chiral, since the molecules are ordered in... 

Usually, dissolution of a small amount of one compound in a pure liquid is enthalpically unfavourable and driven by an increase in (mixing) entropy. At room temperature, the opposite is true for the dissolution of a small apolar compound in water. This unexpected behaviour is referred to as the hydrophobic effect [4]. Classically, this effect has been rationalised by ordered water structures around apolar compounds (entropy reduction) and the increase in number... 

The unique ability of crown ethers to form stable complexes with various cations has been used to advantage in such diverse processes as isotope separations (Jepson and De Witt, 1976), the transport of ions through artificial and natural membranes (Tosteson, 1968) and the construction of ion-selective electrodes (Ryba and Petranek, 1973). On account of their lipophilic exterior, crown ether complexes are often soluble even in apolar solvents. This property has been successfully exploited in liquid-liquid and solid-liquid phase-transfer reactions. Extensive reviews deal with the synthetic aspects of the use of crown ethers as phase-transfer catalysts (Gokel and Dupont Durst, 1976 Liotta, 1978 Weber and Gokel, 1977 Starks and Liotta, 1978). Several studies have been devoted to the identification of the factors affecting the formation and stability of crown-ether complexes, and many aspects of this subject have been discussed in reviews (Christensen et al., 1971, 1974 Pedersen and Frensdorf, 1972 Izatt et al., 1973 Kappenstein, 1974). 

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