Chemistry at the Speed of Light The fascinating field of microwave chemistry has only recently emerged along with the ubiquity of inexpensive domestic microwave ovens. The eighties saw the first trickle of journal articles that dared to take advantage of this new heating medium, followed by a steadily increasing stream of publications throughout the nineties. The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen the subject of microwave chemistry flourish with vital prominence at symposiums and seminars, in specialized journal publications, and in the availability of specialized microwave reactors.
Microwave chemistry is so promising because very often chemical reactions that take hours, days, or weeks with conventional heating can be completed in minutes, or seconds when conducted in a microwave. The microwave has also enabled many chemical reactions to be used with less toxic solvents, or without any solvents at all. Microwave chemical reactions have great potential to be a “green chemistry” tool, reducing environmental waste and using fewer chemical ingredients.
Not every aspect of using microwaves is fully understood by scientists. There are some inconsistencies with chemical reactions that seem possible only with microwave energy. This is called the “microwave effect.” While physicists are busy unraveling and explaining the observed microwave effect, chemists are busy exploiting it to wonderful results.
The amateur chemist should be especially interested in using the microwave because it can reduce or eliminate the need for many difficult to obtain chemical ingredients, in can enable certain types of reactions that traditionally would have required specialized equipment or expensive catalysts, and the equipment itself, a domestic microwave oven, is an appliance found in just about every household.
More recently chemists are trying to ruin the ease and simplicity of microwave chemistry by only recommending expensive dedicated microwave reactors, and some journal publishers have even gone so far as to forbid publication of any research article that uses a domestic microwave oven. It is still quite possible to conduct many microwave reactions, safely, in an unmodified household microwave despite attempts at elitism. With some modification of a microwave the range of experiments that can be performed are greatly increased.
Microwave chemistry is still a very new science compared to other aspects of chemistry that have been around for generations. Indeed it would seem just about any synthesis performed in the microwave is bound to be a new and unique discovery, although every representative type of chemical reaction has been tried already, there are new publications coming out almost every day with surprising results.
In this section I have collected an assortment of publications about microwave chemistry and microwave assisted chemical reactions. Because microwave chemistry is such a rapidly evolving field I will be continually adding information as it comes across my desk. Besides the handful of books published specifically about microwave chemistry, I have included select journals, explanations of important terms, and some tips to modify a domestic microwave for scientific use.
