Working to scale up borohydride reduction of ester
Hello all.
I've been tasked with a scale up synthesis project where one of the pivotal steps is a reduction of an aliphatic ester into an alcohol. The target will be to produce multiple kilos of the product by the end of the project. I've done some legwork to avoid LAH as a reductant since I fear that will make handling difficult at larger volumes, but I was looking for advice and safety considerations as we start planning to scale this chemistry up. It's still at the bench scale for now but the aim will to be to have enough optimization of the chemistry so that it can scale to multi kilo batches relatively seamlessly.
My synthetic experience is predominantly bench scale, but I have done some larger scale steel process vessel work, but not in the context of organic synthesis. I would appreciate any voodoo and wisdom y'all possess on running these types of reactions at scale. Things like quenching protocols and solvent/reagent selections to try would be awesome.