Another paper on the theme of solvents, is from Paul Murray working with the University College London and concerns the use of solvent maps and design of experiments (DoE). IN DoE solvent is usually considered to be a discrete or categorical variable, but by applying principle components analysis one can generate solvent maps so that solvent maps can be generated and this allows solvents to be considered as continuous variables albeit in a quantized form. This idea is not new but this paper makes available a new 3 dimensional solvent map with 136 solvents included. There are also some good examples of using the map to find more environmentally friendly solvents to replace unusable solvents such as 1,2-dichloroethane which appears far too frequently in new methodology from academic groups that would otherwise be very useful.
P.M. Murray, F. Bellany, L. Benhamou, D.-J. Bučar, A.B. Tabor, and T.D Sheppard, Org. Biomol. Chem., 2016, 14, 2373-2384.
