Highly reactive chemistry involves compounds or operating conditions that pose significant hazards in research and manufacturing due to high risks of explosion, unwanted human exposure, and poor product quality causedby reaction excursion. Such risks are typically originated from the following characteristics of highly reactive chemistry:
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Due to their effectiveness in enabling a broad range of chemical transformations, many types of highly reactive chemistry offer the preferred synthetic options. As a result, highly reactive chemistry is periodically used by virtually every chemist involved in process research and development for the synthesis of organic compounds such as:
- Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs)
- Specialty polymers
- Agricultural chemicals (e.g. herbicides, pesticides, etc.)
- High energy materials
- Special materials (e.g. nano-particles, chemo-sensors, etc.)
- Organo-catalysts, ligands
Examples of these indispensible synthetic reactions include the use of Grignard and organolithium reagents, and azide, diazo and phosgene chemistries.
To minimize the hazardous risk in process research and development, many highly reactive chemistries have been monitored and controlled effectively to provide a deeper understanding and better control of the reactions without the need for offline sampling and analysis.