Professor Graham Hutchings FRS |
Researchers from the Cardiff Univ. School of Chemistry are
opening up a new way of using hydrocarbon feedstocks to make a range of
valuable products.
Hydrocarbons are an extremely important energy resource but,
although widely available from fossil fuels, are extremely difficult to
activate and require very high temperatures in current industrial processes.
For the
first time, the Cardiff
study has shown that the primary carbon-hydrogen bonds in toluene, a
hydrocarbon widely used as an industrial material, can be activated selectively
at low temperatures.
Professor
Graham Hutchings FRS, Cardiff School of Chemistry, one of the study’s
co-authors and the Univ.’s Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, said: “One of
the key challenges facing chemists today is to activate primary carbon-hydrogen
bonds in hydrocarbons to make more valuable and reactive molecules. This is
crucial for the sustainable exploitation of available industrial feedstocks.
Our
research resulted in unprecedented yields of a single product of over 90%. We
achieved this using a gold catalyst, an unexpected result as gold is the most
noble of the elements.”
This opens
up the possibility of using hydrocarbon feedstocks in a new way to form
intermediates and final products for use in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and
agricultural business sectors.
The
research was carried out by a large team at the Cardiff Catalysis Institute, in
collaboration with researchers at Lehigh
Univ., Pennsylvania.
It was funded by a major research grant won by the School of Chemistry
in 2008, when it was selected from hundreds of international bids as part of
the Dow Methane Challenge. The challenge was initiated by the Dow Chemical
Company to identify collaborators and approaches in the area of methane
conversion to chemicals.
The paper,
‘Solvent-Free Oxidation of Primary Carbon-Hydrogen Bonds in Toluene Using Au-Pd
Alloy Nanoparticles’, is published in Science.
