The synthesis of porphyrins is notoriously time- and resource-consuming, largely because of the purification methods needed to isolate the product—often one or several chromatography columns requiring many liters of solvent to purify less than 1g of product are standard procedure. This is because several byproducts, including polypyrroles, chlorins, and phlorins, are produced alongside the porphyrin. Our objective of finding more environmentally-benign routes to porphyrins has led us to explore entrainment sublimation using tetraphenylporphyrin (TPP) as a model compound. Since TPP sublimes at around 400°C, the procedure has been carried out and optimized near this temperature using a tube furnace with Pyrex processing tube and nitrogen as a carrier gas. The purified yields from those experiments at varying heating rates, times, and gas flows, will be reported.

Entrainment sublimation as a green purification method for porphyrins

251st National Meeting (2016)

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