Application of microwave spectroscopy to chemical analysis

Traditional analytical techniques have been sucessfully employed on a great variety of systems for identifying stable reaction products as well as for purity analysis and reaction efficiency. However, most analytical techniques generally can only be applied to "well-behaved" chemical systems. Since gas phase reaction products do not always follow the "well-behaved" guideline, an alternate analytical tool, such as microwave spectroscopy, could prove beneficial for analyzing such systems and may well provide some new routes to synthetic chemistry. A general review of the present state-of-the-art for applications of microwave techniques to analytical studies will be presented. An attempt will be made to describe the limitations and advantages of microwave spectroscopy for probing chemical systems for product identification and for optimization of the efficiency of gas phase chemical reactions. As an illustration, some recent results obtained in our laboratory on the complex pyrolytic decomposition reactions of ethylamine will be described. Further examples of possible applications will be taken from typical industrial processes that employ vapor phase chemical synthesis techniques.