A very large percentage of all industrially used chemical catalysts contain platinum group metals (platinum, palladium, iridium, rhodium, osmium, and ruthenium), which are all fairly low in abundance, and as a result are quite expensive in addition to often times being toxic. Despite this, platinum group metals are predominantly featured in catalysts for a wide-range of industrial reactions ranging from fuel cells to organic transformation or polymerization reactions used in the preparation of anything from plastics to pharmaceutical drugs. Even though there are financial, and in some cases environmental reasons for these metals to be phased out, there are not many functional alternatives for these rare metal containing catalysts. In an effort to design new alternatives to catalysts containing platinum group metals, we are interested in synthesizing nickel and iron complexes of N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs). One of the big reasons many chemists are drawn to NHCs is that they are a class of molecules that offer a lot of tunability as far as the size, shape, and electronic properties of the compounds. These are all critical factors that need to be controlled in order to design good catalysts, and the fact that many of these properties can be altered by making chemical changes to the carbene compound before attaching it to a metal make them a prime target to be used in the design of new catalysts. We plan to present on our efforts towards the development of new synthetic methods for making transition metal carbene complexes that avoid silver transmetallation, with focuses on exploring routes involving mechanochemistry and electrochemistry. Characterization of synthesized compounds along with comparisons to previous synthetic methods for yields and cost efficacy will be presented.

In search of new synthetic routes for the preparation of N-heterocylic carbene complexes of first row transition metals

251st National Meeting (2016)

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