Glycerol as an efficient promoting medium for organic reactions

Whereas the beneficial effect of water on reaction rate is decreased with an increase of the reactant's hydrophobicity, we report here that the use of glycerol as solvent was able to considerably accelerate the reaction rate of an organic reaction even starting from more hydrophobic substrates than those usually used on water. Moreover, the possibility of directly using crude glycerol generated by the biodiesel industry economically and environmentally improves the interest of using glycerol as solvent.