Rationalizing and Adapting Water-Accelerated Reactions for Sustainable Flow Organic Processes.

Water-accelerated reactions, wherein at least one organic reactant is not soluble in water, are an important class of organic reactions, with a potentially pivotal impact on sustainability of chemical manufacturing processes. However, mechanistic understanding of the factors controlling the acceleration effect has been limited, due to the complex and varied physical and chemical nature of these processes. In this study, a theoretical framework has been established to calculate the rate acceleration of known water-accelerated reactions, giving computational estimations of the change to Δ which correlate with experimental data.