Nitrous Oxide as an Oxygen Donor in Oxidation Chemistry and Catalysis

Nitrous Oxide as an Oxygen Donor in Oxidation Chemistry and Catalysis 

Gennady I. Panov, Konstantin A. Dubkov, and Alexander S. Kharitonov 

Oxidation by dioxygen has a fundamental difficulty. The molecule has a diatomic structure, while in most cases only one atom is needed for selective oxidation of organic compounds. Even in the case of more complex reactions, the stoichiometry of which requires several (and sometimes many) oxygen atoms, the oxidation process on a catalyst surface is likely to proceed step by step, involving consecutively one oxygen atom after another. 

The creation of selective catalysts for such complex reactions seems to be an especially difficult problem. Nevertheless, surprisingly, selective catalysts have been developed for complex reactions, which can be exemplified by the oxidation and ammoxidation of propylene, oxidation of butene and even butane to maleic anhydride (which requires seven oxygen atoms). Such reactions are usually performed over V and Mo oxide systems [4, 6, 8-10]. High selectivity of these systems is presumably provided by a special structure of the catalyst surface that allows control 

However, attempts to develop similar selective catalysts failed in the case of reactions that require one oxygen atom, like the oxidation of methane, ethane and other alkanes to alcohols, aromatic compounds to phenols, alkenes to epoxides, and many others. These mechanistically simple reactions assume one difficult condition the presence of active sites that upon obtaining two atoms from gas-phase 02 can transfer only one of them to the molecule to be oxidized, reserving the second atom for the next catalytic cycle with another molecule. This problem remains a hard challenge for chemical catalysis. 

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