Chemistry in Pictures: Diazo rainbow

What you’re looking at is not one, but five reactions running through the same flow reactor. While studying at the Université de Montréal in the lab of André B. Charette, Eric Levesque designed continuous-flow-synthesis systems similar to this one. This work focused on making diazo compounds, which are synthetically useful yet hard-to-handle molecules. Because flow reactions bring only small amounts of starting materials into contact at once, they have the potential to be safer and thus can be scaled up for industry. Each color of hosing in this flow reactor represents a different reaction product being made sequentially in the tubing (Ph is phenyl):

PhC(N₂)CO₂C₂H₅ (yellow)

PhC(N₂)CF₃ (light orange)

PhC(N₂)H (dark orange)

((4-CH₃)Ph)C(N₂)H (light pink)

Ph₂CN₂ (dark pink).

Submitted by Eric Levesque. Read the paper: Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2017, 10.1002/anie.201608444.

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