Reduction of Aldehydes by Fe-H_2O-CO_2 System in Supercritical Carbon Dioxide

1 Introduction Nowadays,green chemistry has received in creased attention.The use of water and scCO2 as a solvent or reagent is an important field for organic reactions and green chemistry both in laboratory and industry1-4]. The reduction of aldehydes to the corresponding alcohols is an important reaction in organic synthesis and an important step in the synthesis of biologically active compounds5,6].A number of reducing systems utilized have been developed for this purpose,including H2 catalyzed by metals7,8],NaBH49],and Al-MFn-H2O10].However,all the procedures suffered from many disadvantages,such as moisture-sensitive,low chemoselectivity,presence of a pyrophoric expensive catalyst and lack of environmentally benign processes.