Microwave Enhanced Hydroamination of Styrene.

Synthesis of -phenethylamines has been a matter of interest due to their pharmacological properties, and there are several methods to prepare -phenethylamines. Our group has been trying to develop new methods for the hydroamination of styrene, and recently we have communicated our results1. But, when we tried to react lithium anilide(PhNH2/BuLi) with styrene in THF at O C it failed. In a previous work2 there has been reported the hydroamination of styrene with aniline sodium salt by heating for 7 hours at 184 C, and recently, it was reported3 that aniline added to styrene by heating in a sealed tube with Kt-BuO. Now, we attempted to perform the reaction in the absence of solvent and in an open vessel under microwave heating. We used the potassium tert-butoxide as base in a ratio to aniline 1:1, but we have problems with ignition of the reaction mixture. We investigated the influence of several ratios PhNH2/Kt-BuO, founding that a 10% ratio gave the best yield with a 60% of N-phenyl- -phenethylamine, isolated by column chromatography.