Catalysis is perhaps the most important expression of chemical ingenuity and is the center of many proposed solutions to societal problems including energy storage, new treatments for disease, and new materials for applications in our daily lives. Catalysis is also one of the most important methods for building wealth worldwide with an estimated 35% of the global GDP contributed by catalysis. While tools for understanding catalysts containing low valent metals have developed steadily for over half a century, high valent metal catalysis is largely optimized using combinatorial methods in amalgamation with the chemist’s intuition. This is despite the fact that high valent catalysis contributes enormously to industrial reactions like olefin polymerization and oxidation chemistry. The main ingredient lacking for high valent catalyst design has been a method for quantifying the donor abilities of the myriad of different ancillary ligands employed. In this presentation, a brief overview of an approach for measuring donor abilities to high valent metals will be given followed by applications in understanding ligand binding and modeling catalytic reactions to discover quantitatively how sterics and electronics contribute to reaction rates. <br/>

Designing and understanding catalysis with high valent metals

254th National Meeting (2017)

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