The ever-worsening environmental crisis has stimulated development of less wasteful “green” technologies. To this end, tandem catalysis enables multiple catalytic cycles to be performed within a single reaction vessel, thereby eliminating intermediate processing steps and reducing solvent waste. Assisted tandem catalysis employs suitable chemical triggers to transform the initial catalyst into new species, thereby providing a mechanism for “switching on” secondary catalytic activity.
This thesis demonstrates the importance of highly productive secondary catalysts through a comparative hydrogenation study involving prominent hydrogenation catalysts of tandem ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP)-hydrogenation, of which hydridocarbonyl species were proved superior. This thesis illuminates optimal routes to hydridocarbonyls under conditions relevant to our ROMP-hydrogenation protocol, using Grubbs benzylidenes as isolable proxies for ROMP-propagating alkylidene species. Analogous studies of ruthenium methylidenes and ethoxylidenes illuminate optimal routes to hydridocarbonyls following ring-closing metathesis (RCM) and metathesis quenching, respectively. The formation of unexpected side products using aggressive chemical triggers is also discussed, and emphasizes the need for cautious design of the post-metathesis trigger phase.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/22731 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Beach, Nicholas James |
| Contributors | Fogg, Deryn |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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