Dendrimer Supported Catalysts

Since the pioneering work on dendritic structures by Vogtle et al.,[28] dendrimers have attracted much attention. The synthesis and investigation of their structural properties became a new field in science. The application of dendrimers as support molecules for homogeneous catalysts was first reported by Van Koten et al. in 1994.[29] Dendrimers have the advantage of having perfect structures unlike polymeric structures and are 

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Homogeneous catalysis with a dendrimer supported catalyst was introduced by van Koten et al. in 1994 [68] and since then has rapidly expanded [5, 64—67]. The advantage of dendrimers over linear or irregular polymeric supports is their well-... 

II. Catalyst Recycling in Applications of Dendrimer-Supported Catalysts... 

Nonetheless, the transposition of homogeneous catalytic reactions from unsupported to dendrimer-supported catalysts is still not straightforward. Various dendritic effects , positive and negative ones, on the activity, selectivity, stability and solubility of metallodendrimer catalysts have been observed in this respect. In our own research we have found that a high concentration of metal centers at periphery-functionalized metallodendrimers may translate into a decrease in the catalytic performance due to undesirable side-reactions between the catalytic sites at the dendrimer surface (Fig. 4 and Scheme 4). In contrast, when the exact same catalyst is located at the focal point of a dendron, this matter is avoided by isolating the active site, thereby providing a more stable albeit less active catalyst (Scheme 13). 

Addition of 1 equivalent of allylic ester to 1,4 diiodobenzene was studied as a model Heck reaction. The dendrimer-supported catalyst was found to favor the production of the monosubstituted benzyl product over the disubstituted product by a factor of approximately 12 1. In contrast, catalysis of the same reaction by the uncomplexed phosphine catalyst resulted in an approximately equimolar distribution of mono- and disubstituted products. 

The dendrimer-supported catalysts described in Sect. 7.5 were also tested in allylic alcohol isomerization. Isomerization of l-octen-3-ol into octan-3-one was... 

Most of the supports so far studied are conventional in the field of catalysis. Some new kinds of support have emerged including mesostructured materials,193 dendrimers, organic-inorganic hybrids, and natural polymers such as polysaccharides or polyaminoacids. Nevertheless, at the moment, supported catalysts still suffer from relatively poor stability when compared to classical heterogeneous catalysts, and from limited activity when compared to homogeneous catalysts. The driving force for this research is thus to make up some of these deficits. 

Van Koten et al. reported on a negative dendritic effect in the Kharasch addition reaction. [3 9,40] A fast deactivation for the carbosilane dendrimer supported NCN pincer catalyst (Figures 4.28 and 4.29) was observed by comparison with a mononuclear analogue. This deactivation is expected to be caused by irreversible formation of inactive Ni(III) sites on the periphery of these dendrimers. 

Attachment of dendritic wedges of either the carbosilane or benzylphenyl ether type to the para-hydroxy aryl site in [2,6-(ArN=CMe)2C5H3N (1 R = Me, Ar = 2-Me-4-OHC6H3), has been shown to proceed in good yield [162], Complexation with iron(II) chloride allows access to dendrimer-supported precatalyst 42 (Scheme 13). Using MAO as a co-catalyst, it was shown that 42 are active in the oligomerisation of ethylene the activity of these new catalysts is not, however, related to the type of dendritic wedge employed. 

Another way of retaining the catalyst is to create dendrimer-supported ligands, thereby allowing separation of the product and catalyst by membranes. Based on the readily modified BICOL backbone, two dendrimer-Hgands 43 were prepared that had performance comparable to that of MonoPhos 29 a in the hydrogenation of methyl N-acyl dehydrophenylalanine [81]. 

Immobilizing DENs within a sol-gel matrix is another potential method for preparing new supported catalysts. PAMAM and PPI dendrimers can be added to sol-gel preparations of silicas " and zinc arsenates to template mesopores. In one early report, the dendrimer bound Cu + ions were added to sol-gel silica and calcined to yield supported copper oxide nanoparticles. Sol-gel chemistry can also be used to prepare titania supported Pd, Au, and Pd-Au nanoparticle catalysts. Aqueous solutions of Pd and Au DENs were added to titanium isopropoxide to coprecipitate the DENs with Ti02. Activation at 500°C resulted in particles approximately 4 nm in diameter. In this preparation, the PAMAM dendrimers served two roles, templating both nanoparticles and the pores of the titania support. 

Using the dendrimer route, it is possible to prepare supported catalysts not available via traditional routes. Dendrimer derived Pt-Au catalysts having compositions within the bulk miscibility gap can be prepared on several oxide supports. For all the supports studied, the bimetallic catalysts exhibited synergism with respect to mono- and cometallic catalysts for the CO oxidation and hydrocarbon NOx SCR reactions. The bimetallic Pt-Au catalysts also showed evidence of exchanging surface and subsurface atoms in response to strongly binding ligands such as CO. 

Some conclusions can be drawn from comparison of the TOF values obtained using biphasic catalysis with literature data for the same reactions catalyzed by a polymer-supported Pd(0) catalyst (Table 2) [161]. First, although the TOFs for the dendrimer-encapsulated catalysts are consistently lower than for the polymer-supported catalysts, the values are in some cases comparable. Second, the selectivity pattern exhibited by the two types of catalysts is somewhat different. Specifically, the range of TOF numbers for biphasic catalysis is far greater than for conventional polymer catalysis, which suggests the possibility of the type of... 

In a batch process, all dendritic catalysts showed very high activity. When a substrate-to-Pd molar ratio of 2000 was used, the conversions after 5 min were 49, 55, 45, and 47% when dendrimers with 4, 36, 8, and 24 phosphine ligands were used, respectively. These results show that all the active sites located at the periphery of the dendrimer support acted independently as catalysts. 

The same authors recently described the synthesis of similar rhodium-complexed dendrimers supported on a resin having both interior and exterior functional groups. These were tested as catalysts for the hydroformylation of aryl alkenes and vinyl esters (52). The results show that the reactions proceeded with high selectivity for the branched aldehydes, with excellent yields, even up to the tenth cycle. The hydroformylation experiments were carried out with first- and a second-generation rhodium-complexed dendrimers as catalysts, with a mixture of 34.5 bar of CO and 34.5 bar of H2 in dichloromethane at room temperature. Each catalyst was easily recovered by simple filtration and was reusable for at least six more cycles without... 

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