How easily can microwave synthetic reactions be converted from small-scale to larger volumes?
Experienced synthetic chemists, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, have come to recognize the ease of scalability associated with microwave methods as a principal benefit—just as important as the speed of reactions. With traditional methods, a great deal of time-consuming thought and experimentation are required to convert milligram-scale reactions to larger volumes. However, in the microwave, the same conditions that worked at the smallest scale will work at a much larger scale, to generate a proportional yield of equal purity. The work that goes into optimizing a reaction needs to be performed only once. For more information on this topic, see Dr. C. Oliver Kappe’s article Back to the Roots, and Dr. Alex Rabinovich’s article on The Scale-Up of Microwave-Assisted Organic Reactions.
