10/2014

Prof. Jones’ group from Georgia Institute of Technology published a paper in Chemistry – An Asian Journal, in which his group describes the development of solid-supported iron catalysts for C-H bond oxidations. This development aims to increase the efficiency of these iron catalysts through facile recycling and reuse of the valuable catalytic components.

In recent years, iron catalysts have emerged as attractive alternatives to the more common precious-metal catalysts, owing to iron’s high abundance, low cost, and low toxicity. However, iron catalysts are plagued by two key factors: the ligand cost and the low turnover numbers (TONs) typically achieved. In this work, four new supported catalysts were prepared using two different approaches on two different support materials. The catalysts were shown to be effective in an array of C–H functionalization reactions that employed aqueous hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant. Catalyst recovery and recycling was demonstrated using the supported catalysts, which allows for a modest increase in the TON achieved with these catalysts.

The Jones group is working on making the supported catalysts more robust and improving their turnover numbers further.