Inorganic Syntheses Assisted by Microwave Heating

This Special Issue on " Inorganic Syntheses Assisted by Microwave Heating " represents one of the few fully dedicated issues on inorganic microwave synthesis published by any international scientific journal and it features five papers and one review article. Microwave irradiation has been used for many years to accelerate chemical reactions. The very first application of 2.45 GHz microwaves in processing began with heating and cooking food in kitchens all over the world. However, the use of microwaves in analytical laboratories began later, starting with drying organic and inorganic samples in order to determine the amount of moisture [1] and later it was used for the dissolution or decomposition of not only biological but also geological materials [2–5]. Komarneni and Roy pioneered the use of microwaves in the liquid state for synthesis and published a seminal paper in Materials Letters in 1985 [6,7]. Unfortunately, the historical significance of this paper entitled " Titania gel spheres by a new sol-gel process " was not recognized by many as the title of this paper did not itself refer to microwaves. Nevertheless, the abstract clearly states that microwaves led to fast reaction as follows and we quote: " A new technique is devised for the preparation of solution derived titania gel spheres. The gel sphere preparation process involves the dispersal of the polymerized titanium ethoxide solution into a two-phase liquid suspension in kerosene followed by heating in a microwave oven. This is a simple and fast method for the preparation of xerogel spheres with diameter in the range of tens of micrometers which may be useful in coating technology by plasma-spraying ". Gedye et al., 1986 [8] and Gigure et al., 1986 [9] may have been the first to report on the use of microwaves for organic syntheses in 1986. These two papers are generally recognized as pioneering OPEN ACCESS