균일상,유기상-수상 경계면에서 전이금속 복합체 촉매를 이용한 테트라린의 산화반응

초록

In a conventional liquid-phase synthesis, an organic solvent typically takes on multiple functions that may include (1) solubilizing the reactant(s), catalyst, or intermediate product(s) of the reaction, (2) serving as a catalyst ligand and promoting the desired reaction through an electronic or steric effect at the catalyst, and (3) acting as an acid or base. These functional requirements severely restrict the choice of the solvent candidates that are often toxic, hazardous or environmentally troublesome. In a biphasic synthesis, the choice of solvent candidates is broadened and the chances for a benign synthesis are improved by decoupling the functional requirements of the reaction medium and separately assigning them to a combination of aqueous and organic phases. In this work, the new biphasic technique has been extended to the autoxidation of tetralin with various combinations of transition metals and surface-active ligands. The tetralin autoxidation reaction is of interest because it is a key intermediary step in the commercial production of α-naphthol. For comparison with the biphasic mode of the reaction, the reaction was also studied in a homogeneous mode with dimethylformamide (DMF) as the solvent. The results, as will be shown shortly, reveal some fundamental differences between the two modes of the reaction.