Carbon dioxide emission has been a major environmental and economical concern as its global emission surpassed 10 gigatonnes in 2014, 20% higher than 2010. Thus, developing an effective, sustainable route towards sequestration of the CO2, as a crucial reagent for organic syntheses, onto various substrates has been an ever-expanding area of interest from the pharmaceutical and polymer industries. The reactions of carboxylation, on substrates such as organohalides have been particularly studied.Among the proposed methods to accomplish this objective, electrochemical deposition has been found promising due to the ease of reaction conditions, ease of tracking the reactions, and the ability to optimize a multitude conditions compared to traditional batch reactor configuration. In addition to the advantageous aspects of electrochemical synthesis, the ability to easily perform the reactions using catalyst systems has made this approach more prominent for complex organic molecules synthesis. Atobe et. al. studied carboxylation of various aryl halides via platinum electrocatalysis. However, homogeneous platinum electrodes were used in that process, which has an inherent risk of platinum leaching resulting in lower electrocatalytic efficiency as well as metal contaminating the product. Both of these lead to more complicated or additional workup steps and/or longer reaction times ultimately resulting in higher production costs. Herein, the electrocatalytic carboxylation of benzyl chloride, as a model substrate, using solid-supported platinum on graphene nanoplatelet (Pt/GNP) catalyst was studied. In this approach, glassy carbon electrodes coated with the Pt/GNP catalyst were used compared with the conventional platinum plate electrode system. The Pt/GNP catalyst was synthesized using a microwave-assisted, strong electrostatic adsorption (SEA-MW) method. This solid-supported Pt/GNP catalyst/GCE electrode system significantly lowered the total amount of platinum required for the reaction and improved the catalytic activity compared to a traditional electrochemical set-up using Pt plate as the working electrode.

Low temperature electrocatalytic carboxylation of aryl halides via platinum-decorated graphene nanoplatelet electrodes

256th National Meeting (2018)

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