SFB 985 on the back cover of Chemical Communications

Enhanced catalytic activity of copper complexes in microgels for aerobic oxidation of benzyl alcohols

As part of Project A1 of the Sonderforschungsbereich 985 we analyzed in cooperation with Prof. Dr. A. Pich the impact of the immobilization of copper complexes into microgels on the catalytic activity. Therefore, copper bis(pyrazolyl)methane complexes were anchored in a N-vinyl caprolactam based microgels. These new catalytic systems were used for the aerobic oxidation of benzyl alcohols towards the respective aldehydes.

Our studies show that the catalytic activity of the copper complex can be significantly increased due to the immobilization into microgels. This can be attributed to the special environment on the inside of the microgels. Due to the immobilization an unpolar environment is created which facilitates the reduction to copper(I) and due to the spatial separation of the complexes copper ion aggregation is reduced.

Dominic Schäfer, Fabian Fink, Denise Kleinschmidt, Kristina Keisers, Fabian Thomas, Alexander Hoffmann, Andrij Pich and Sonja Herres-Pawlis

DOI: 10.1039/D0CC02433C