Organic Chemistry in Industry

Carboxylic acids are present in many industrial processes and most biological pathways and are the starting materials from which other acyl derivatives are made. Thus, an understanding of their properties and reactions is fundamental to understanding organic chemistry. In this chapter, we ll look both at acids and at their close relatives, nitriles (RC=N). In the next chapter, we ll look at acyl derivatives. 

The operation of industrial scale synthetic organic chemistry in an environmentally acceptable manner requires that all these effluent categories be dealt with properly. In small scale operations in a research or academic setting, provision should be made for dealing with the more environmentally offensive categories. 

Physical chemistry began to prosper partly from institutional and industrial causes. Some students who set out to study organic chemistry in the late nineteenth century were dissuaded from their aim by overcrowded conditions in the instructional and research laboratories. One example is Arthur A. Noyes, who was to establish the first physical chemistry research laboratory in America at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He set out for Germany in 1888 with his friend Samuel Mulliken, father of the later theoretical and quantum chemist, Robert Mulliken. 

The third volume introduces the reader to fundamental principles of chemistry, following descriptions in the two earlier volumes of states of matter experiments on air, water, and so on descriptions of the properties of nonmetals and metals reactions in organic chemistry and industrial chemical processes. 

Since the epoxidation of alkenes with peracids was discovered by Prilezajew in 1909 [29], epoxides have played a major role in organic chemistry and industry, providing important intermediates for the synthesis of more complex molecules. Metal-catalyzed epoxidation reactions have received much attention in recent decades since the discovery of the Sharpless epoxidation [30, 31], but most epoxides were prepared from alkenes primarily by their interaction with peracids. 

Paul Anastas was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on May 16, 1962. He attended the University of Massachusetts at Boston, from which he earned his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1984. He then studied at Brandeis University, outside Boston, where he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1989. His first job was as a consultant to chemical industries on the development of new analytical and synthetic chemical processes. 

H. A. Wittcoff and B. G. Reuben, Industrial Organic Chemistry in Perspective, Part I, Wiley, New York, 1980. 

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