Aromatics are key building block molecules for the chemical industry. They are currently produced mainly by a process of catalytic reforming of petroleum feedstocks, which is carried out at temperatures of around 500°C, and produces a complex mixture of molecules that need to be subsequently separated.
Now a team led by Alan Goldman of Rutgers University and Maurice Brookhart of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has shown that it is possible to produce aromatic molecules from their straight-chain counterparts, n-alkanes, at temperatures several hundred degrees lower than other methods.
Pincer-ligated iridium complex (Photo: Nature Chem.) |
When an alkane is introduced to the catalyst, the iridium inserts itself between a C-H bond and pries the hydrogen away, presenting it to a hydrogen acceptor - in this case t-butylethylene. This results in the generation of a double bond within the carbon chain. The process is repeated twice more, creating a triene, which then undergoes cyclisation followed by loss of an additional equivalent of hydrogen to produce the aromatic product.
Different aromatics are produced depending on the number of carbons in the starting alkane. Many of the subsequent products are difficult or impossible to produce by other means says Goldman. 'For example if you start with decane, you end up with linear alkyl aromatics that are normally impossible to obtain with conventional routes, which combine olefins and lighter aromatics. Alternatively, if you tried to make these products from alkanes using current heterogenous routes you would get extensive bond breaking of the carbon chains, whereas we get mostly compounds with the same carbon number as our starting material.'
R. Ahuja et al, Nature Chem., 2010, DOI: 10.1038/nchem.946
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