Abstract
Alcohol protection and deprotection reactions, catalyzed by solid-supported sulfonic acid, have been investigated under continuous-flow conditions. Primary, secondary, benzylic and phenolic alcohols can be protected under these conditions by tetrahydropyranyl and several silyl ether moieties, generating synthetically useful amounts of material in short time. Furthermore, the described setup can be used to deprotect protected alcohols and be used in selective protection reactions. Because the solid-supported acid catalyst is continually reused in a packed-bed approach, workup is greatly simplified and in most cases only solvent removal is necessary, while reaching high turn-over numbers.