Oxidative Reactions of Butadiene with Pd2 Salts

Pd2+ salts are useful reagents for oxidation reactions of olefins. Formation of acetaldehyde from ethylene is the typical example. Another reaction is the formation of vinyl acetate by the reaction of ethylene with acetic acid (16, 17). The reaction of acetic acid with butadiene in the presence of PdCl2 and disodium hydrogen phosphate to give butadienyl acetate was briefly reported by Stem and Spector (110). However, 1-acetoxy-2-butene (49) and 3-acetoxy-l-butene (50) were obtained by Ishii and co-workers (111) by simple 1,2- and 1,4-additions using PdCl2/CuCl2 in acetic acid-water (9 1). 

Heck obtained 4-phenyI-3-acetoxy-l-butene (126) by the reaction of butadiene, phenylmercury acetate, and lead tetraacetate in the presence of a catalytic amount of Pd(OAc)2 (112)  

The most important reaction is the oxidative addition of two moles of acetic acid to butadiene to form 1,4-diacetoxy-2-butene (21) with the reduction of Pd2+ to Pd°. In this reaction, 3,4-diacetoxy-l-butene (127) is also formed. In order to carry out the reaction catalytic with regard to Pd2+, a redox system is used. This reaction attracts attention from the standpoint of industrial production of 1,4-butanediol. For this purpose, the formation of 127 should be minimized. Numerous patent applications have been made (examples 113-115), but no paper treating the systematic studies on the reaction has been published. 

A patent claiming the following oxidative carbonylation of butadiene to give unsaturated mono- and diesters has been published (116)  

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