Investigation of the reactions of terminal alkynes in sub- and supercritical water

In this research work, reactions of some terminal alkynes with subcritical water were investigated. The main reason to choose subcritical water as the reaction medium for the experiments is that water is a good solvent for organics under subcritical conditions and the reactions which are carried out in traditional procedures by using acid/base catalaysis can be carried out easily in subcritical conditions just because of high dissociaton constant of subcritical water. The experimental results showed that alkyne conversions are fairly high and hydration/dimerization reactions compete with each other or hydration reactions are dominant over dimerization reactions under subcritical conditions depending on the nature of compounds.