PhenAnOx · New Chemical Synthetic Methods for Reacting Phenols Selectively with Different Molecules and With Itself: Use of Electricity as a Sustainable, Economic and Traceless Reagent.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-03-01 → 2022-02-28
- EU contribution
- €162,806
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
New Chemical Synthetic Methods for Reacting Phenols Selectively with Different Molecules and With Itself: Use of Electricity as a Sustainable, Economic and Traceless Reagent.
The scientific aim of this action was to address one of the most important and urgent problems in the chemical synthesis – the development of new electrosynthethic methods that utilize electricity as a sustainable, economic, and traceless reagent. In this way, the action was to advance the current state-of-the art in the electrosynthesis and provide alternatives for traditional chemical synthetic methods (i.e., reagent-based chemistry) to action’s stakeholders. Importantly, the hinderances of the reagent-based chemistry could be circumvented by applying economic and ecologic electrosynthetic methods. Thus, the wider adoptance of these methods could help chemical industries within EU to mitigate CO2 emissions and aid the industry to meet the ambitious carbon dioxide reducement goals in the European Green Deal “Fit for 55”. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to steer the project from experimental work to reviewing the literature. The literature review deals with an urgent, underacknowledged, and important topic – the corrosion of metal cathodes. This subject is tightly bound to the experimental plan and is currently a serious problem that is preventing the translation and implementation of electroorganic synthesis for large-scale chemical manufacturing. Thus, a better acknowledgement of the corrosion of the metal cathodes will play a key part in improving the sustainability of synthetic chemistry and decarbonization of the chemical industry – a point that this work directly addressed.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Inventing new green and inexpensive synthetic methods for relevant chemical compounds is one of the ways how organic chemist can contribute to the well-being of humans and Earth. One of the most promising chemical method for this is synthetic organic electrochemistry. It can replace chemical reducing agents and oxidizers with sole cheap electrons or electron-holes and, at the same time, reduce both the amount of waste and the expense of chemical synthesis. Syntheses are easily controllable as they can be ‘switched-off’ and they are implementable on a large industrial scale with ease. Interestingly, organic electrosynthesis can be used to stabilize electrical grids as fluctuating electric currents are tolerated in certain reactions. The aim of this project is to develop new sustainable, selective and economic electro-organic synthetic methods for the functionalization of phenols. Particularly, we will concentrate on our efforts for finding new ways to form C-heteroatom bonds between phenols and different substrates. At first, we will study the conversion of phenols to diarylethers and dibenzofurans that are important building blocks and core structures of natural products and biologically active substances. Later, we will try to extend the reactivity for phenol-analogues as wll. On the next step, we will study the cross-coupling between phenols and benzoxazoles and its analogues. In this way, we also obtain important synthetic intermediates for organic chemistry in a sustainable and ecologic manner. The proposed action is divided in two research and three additional work packages. The project will be implemented at the Institute of Organic Chemistry of Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz in the research group of Professor Siegfried Waldvogel. He has been one of the driving forces of electro-organic synthesis already for 18 years and made seminal contributions during that time. It is therefore the top laboratory worldwide for performing the proposed action.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- JOHANNES GUTENBERG-UNIVERSITAT MAINZ · MainzCoordinatorGermany
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union