Butylation of phenylacetonitrile in an oscillatory baffled reactor

In this paper, we report our investigation of a liquid-liquid phase-transfer catalysis (PTC) of the butylation of phenylacetonitrile in a novel oscillatory baffled reactor. We evaluated the reaction kinetics by looking at the order of the reaction and examined the effect of operating conditions as well as the PTC catalysts on the conversion. The results demonstrated that the conversion is highly dependent upon the operating conditions for all the different PTC catalysts used. Such a dependence provides an effective means of increasing the productivity of the butylation of phenylacetonitrile without involving the design and testing of new catalysts. © 2005 American Chemical Society.