Catalysis, continued aromatic substitution

Catalysis of oxidation reactions will continue to be of enormous importance in the future. Areas that continue to be of active interest are the development of efficient methods for the direct epoxidation of olefins, hydroxylation and substitution of aromatics as well as the selective oxidation of alkanes. The application of methods developed for industrial chemicals to the synthesis of more complex molecules is worthy of more attention. A few examples have been discussed in the text. On the whole, however, synthetic chemists have not exploited these methods. 

As stated some years ago [2, 4], shape selective catalysis involving bulky molecules continues to be a thrust area in zeolite catalysis. Consequently, test reactions have been developed which are particularly suited to characterize large and super-large pore molecular sieves [34]. In view of possible commercial applications, recent work focussed on the shape selective synthesis of substituted dinuclear aromatics, i.e., 4,4 -diisopropylbiphenyl and 2,6-dialkylnaphthalenes, due to their potential as components in high-temperature resistent polyesters or as liquid crystals. Recent advances in this field are covered in two excellent review articles [35, 36]. 

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