Benzyl Chloride Electroreduction on Ag Cathodes in CH3CN in the Presence of Small Amounts of Water: Evidences of Quantitative Effects on Reaction Rates and Mechanism

In this work, we show our most recent results on the reductive dehalogenation of organic chlorides in acetonitrile + water media on silver electrodes, whose impressive catalytic power toward this reaction have already been extensively demonstrated and discussed. We adopt benzyl chloride as model molecule because of its wide use in previous literature. The results show that the presence of increasing amount of water to pure acetonitrile deeply and quantitatively modifies not only the peak potential (and thus the apparent reaction kinetics) but also the reaction mechanism.