If you think you know what you put into your reactor when you used Aliquat 336 (trademark of BASF) or Adogen 464 (trademark of Evonik), you were more likely than not, WRONG. The confusion in the literature is horrendous and is perpetuated by the incorrect MSDS’s that are ubiquitous on the internet, including those from the most well-known and trusted distributors.
The ONLY MSDS’s that are correct are those from the manufacturers BASF (August 2011 version) and Evonik (June 2010 version). Neither provides a molecular weight, but at PTC Organics, we use a value of 432 g/mole.
If you are relying on older MSDS’s or MSDS’s from Aldrich to determine the structure of the quat salt or its molecular weight or its correct CAS Registry Number, you might be making mistaken assumptions.
These pieces of information may be very important to you if you are attempting to be compliant with regulations, responsible for the fate of the substance, calculating the desired phase-transfer catalyst loading for a PTC application, trying to understand the peaks in a chromatogram, etc.
We recently studied and wrote a summary about the historical MSDS’s for Aliquat 336, Adogen 464, methyl tricaprylyl ammonium chloride, methyl tricapryl ammonium chloride (this is NOT a typo), methyl trioctyl ammonium chloride and similar compounds.
This in-depth 7-page article clarifies the confusion and resolves the issue of the structure of the quat salt and its molecular weight.
Since the article is rather involved, we will share here a few selected pieces of information that we were able to clarify as correct that helps define the substance. The current CAS # for methyl tricaprylyl ammonium chloride is 63393-96-4. If you are using any other CAS #, you need to read this article. If you are using Aliquat 336 or Adogen 464 and compliance is important to you, you need to read this article.
One more potentially huge point, would you be surprised to learn that the quat chloride content of Aliquat 336 and Adogen 464 is only about 90%? Most of you are probably not using that piece of information when determining catalyst loading. I was not aware of this for years. This 10% or so correction means that a lot of academic literature and patent literature has incorrect mole ratios, which also impacts structure-activity relationship conclusions.
You need to read this article, even if you think you’re sure you know what is in a bottle, pail, drum or tank car of Aliquat 336 and Adogen 464.
If your company can benefit from achieving higher process performance in a shorter development time by having access to the best PTC expertise available, now contact Marc Halpern by E-mail to inquire about using phase-transfer catalysis to achieve low-cost high-performance green chemistry.
If you’re not sure if PTC can help your reaction, now fill out the form shown at http://phasetransfer.com/projectform.pdf and send it to Marc Halpern by fax at +1 856-222-1124 or by E-mail of a scanned copy. If we do not have a secrecy agreement already in place, please use “R-groups” instead of the exact chemical structures.
