Reactions Involving Rhodium and Cobalt

Rhodium and cobalt participate in several reactions that are of value in organic syntheses. Rhodium and cobalt are active catalysts for the reaction of alkenes with hydrogen and carbon monoxide to give aldehydes, known as hydroformylation,281 

Pruett, Adv. Organometal. Chem., 17, 1 (1979) H. Siegel and W. Himmele, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl., 19, 178 (1980) J. Falbe, New Syntheses with Carbon Monoxide, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1980. 

The key steps in the reaction are addition of hydridorhodium to the double bond of the alkene and migration of the alkyl group to the complexed carbon monoxide. Hydrogenolysis then leads to the aldehyde. 

Carbonylation can also be carried out under conditions in which the acylrhodium intermediate is trapped by internal nucleophiles. 

The steps in the hydroformylation reaction are closely related to those that occur in the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is the reductive conversion of carbon monoxide to alkanes and occurs by a repetitive series of carbonylation, migration, and reduction 

This method can extend Ni-catalyzed cross coupling to functionalized organometallic reagents. 

Nickel can also be used in place of Pd in Suzuki-type couplings of boronic acids. The main advantage of nickel in this application is that it reacts more readily with aryl chlorides171 and methanesulfonates172 than does the Pd system. These reactants may be more economical than iodides or triflates in large-scale syntheses. 

Similarly, nickel catalysis permits the extension of cross coupling to vinyl phosphates, which are in some cases more readily obtained and handled than vinyl triflates.173 

Miyaura, Tetrahedron Lett. 37 2993 (1996) S. Saito, S. Oh-tani, andN. Miyaura, J. Org. Chem. 62 8024 (1997). 

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Two aspects of porphyrin electrosynthesis will be discussed in this paper. The first is the use of controlled potential electroreduction to produce metal-carbon a-bonded porphyrins of rhodium and cobalt. This electrosynthetic method is more selective than conventional chemical synthetic methods for rhodium and cobalt metal-carbon complexes and, when coupled with cyclic voltammetry, can be used to determine the various reaction pathways involved in the synthesis. The electrosynthetic method can also lead to a simultaneous or stepwise formation of different products and several examples of this will be presented. 

Most of the catalysts employed in the chemical technologies are heterogeneous. The chemical reaction takes place on surfaces, and the reactants are introduced as gases or liquids. Homogeneous catalysts, which are frequently metalloorganic molecules or clusters of molecules, also find wide and important applications in the chemical technologies [24]. Some of the important homogeneously catalyzed processes are listed in Table 7.44. Carbonylation, which involves the addition of CO and H2 to a C olefin to produce a + 1 acid, aldehyde, or alcohol, uses rhodium and cobalt complexes. Cobalt, copper, and palladium ions are used for the oxidation of ethylene to acetaldehyde and to acetic acid. Cobalt(II) acetate is used mostly for alkane oxidation to acids, especially butane. The air oxidation of cyclohexane to cyclohexanone and cyclohexanol is also carried out mostly with cobalt salts. Further oxidation to adipic acid uses copper(II) and vanadium(V) salts as catalysts. The... 

SECTION 8.4. REACTIONS INVOLVING RHODIUM, IRON, AND COBALT... 

Structural types for organometallic rhodium and iridium porphyrins mostly comprise five- or six-coordinate complexes (Por)M(R) or (Por)M(R)(L), where R is a (T-bonded alkyl, aryl, or other organic fragment, and Lisa neutral donor. Most examples contain rhodium, and the chemistry of the corresponding iridium porphyrins is much more scarce. The classical methods of preparation of these complexes involves either reaction of Rh(III) halides Rh(Por)X with organolithium or Grignard reagents, or reaction of Rh(I) anions [Rh(Por)] with alkyl or aryl halides. In this sense the chemistry parallels that of iron and cobalt porphyrins. 

For the hydrosilylation reaction various rhodium, platinum, and cobalt catalysts were employed. For the further chain extension the OH-functionalities were deprotected by KCN in methanol. The final step involved the enzymatic polymerization from the maltoheptaose-modified polystyrene using a-D-glucose-l-phosphalc dipotassium salt dihydrate in a citrate buffer (pH = 6.2) and potato phosphorylase (Scheme 59). The characterization of the block copolymers was problematic in the case of high amylose contents, due to the insolubility of the copolymers in THF. 

Reppe reaction involves carbonylation of methanol to acetic acid and methyl acetate and subsequent carbonylation of the product methyl acetate to acetic anhydride. The reaction is carried out at 600 atm and 230°C in the presence of iodide-promoted cobalt catalyst to form acetic acid at over 90% yield. In the presence of rhodium catalyst the reaction occurs at milder conditions at 30 to 60 atm and 150-200°C. Carbon monoxide can combine with higher alcohols, however, at a much slower reaction rate. 

Independent discovery of the silylformylation of alkynes was reported by the Matsuda and Ojima groups. The general reaction involves addition of both CO and tertiary hydrosilane to an alkyne to yield silyl alkenals, catalyzed by rhodium or rhodium-cobalt mixed metal clusters [Eq. (46)]. 

Industrially the straight chain isomer is generally the most desired product and hence the normal/iso product ratio obtained for a given catalyst is of importance. Further, the hydrogenation activities of catalysts vary considerably such that alcohols can in some cases be obtained in a single step (222). The first catalysts developed for this reaction were based on cobalt carbonyl and later cobalt carbonyl phosphine complexes. However, more recently attention has been focused on the intrinsically much more active rhodium catalysts (222, 223). A simplified mechanism for (223) cobalt- and rhodium-catalyzed hydroformylation has been proposed which involves the following steps ... 

The preparations described here are developed from published work by Malatesta et al.5 and from more recent studies in the contributors own laboratory.2 The cobalt and nickel complexes are prepared by reduction of the corresponding metal nitrates with sodium tetrahydroborate in the presence of excess ligand, whereas the syntheses of the rhodium and platinum complexes involve simple ligand exchange processes. The preparative routes are suitable for use with triphenyl- or p-substituted triphenyl phosphites reactions involving o- or m-substituted triphenyl phosphites give much reduced yields of products which are difficult to crystallize and are very air-sensitive. These features probably reflect the unfavorable stereochemistry of the o- and m-substituted ligands. 

Olefin isomerization has been widely studied, mainly because it is a convenient tool for unravelling basic mechanisms involved in the interaction of olefins with metal atoms (10). The reaction is catalyzed by cobalt hydrocarbonyl, iron pentacarbonyl, rhodium chloride, palladium chloride, the platinum-tin complex, and by several phosphine complexes a review of this field has recently been published (12). Two types of mechanism have been visualized for this reaction. The first involves the preformation of a metal-hydrogen bond into which the olefin (probably already coordinated) inserts itself with the formation of a (j-bonded alkyl radical. On abstraction of a hydrogen atom from a diflFerent carbon atom, an isomerized olefin results. 

A homogeneous catalytic solution to the alcohol inhibition problem (see the discussion under Uncatalyzed chain reactions of the oxidation of alcohol intermediates, above) does not appear to have been found. However, the presence of a heterogeneous oxidative dehydrogenation catalyst has been reported to be effective in the direct oxidation of alcohols to carbonyls and acids [109, 110]. The mechanism probably involves preliminaiy heterogeneous (oxidative) dehydrogenation of carbinols to carbonyls. If the carbonyl is an aldehyde, it is readily converted to the acid. Platinum, palladium, ruthenium, rhodium, and iridium catalysts, supported on carbon, are reported to be active and selective catalysts for the purpose [109]. Promoters such as cobalt and cadmium have been reported to be effective additives. 

The selective production of methanol and of ethanol by carbon monoxide hydrogenation involving pyrolysed rhodium carbonyl clusters supported on basic or amphoteric oxides, respectively, has been discussed. The nature of the support clearly plays the major role in influencing the ratio of oxygenated products to hydrocarbon products, whereas the nuclearity and charge of the starting rhodium cluster compound are of minor importance. Ichikawa has now extended this work to a study of (CO 4- Hj) reactions in the presence of alkenes and to reactions over catalysts derived from platinum and iridium clusters. Rhodium, bimetallic Rh-Co, and cobalt carbonyl clusters supported on zinc oxide and other basic oxides are active catalysts for the hydro-formylation of ethene and propene at one atm and 90-180°C. Various rhodium carbonyl cluster precursors have been used catalytic activities at about 160vary in the order Rh4(CO)i2 > Rh6(CO)ig > [Rh7(CO)i6] >... 

Third, n-allyl complexes are formed by palladium and cobalt analogous complexes of nickel and platinum are less stable, while ruthenium, rhodium, and iridium are not yet known to form them. In catalytic reactions the deuteration of cyclic paraffins over palladium has provided definite evidence for the existence of rr-bonded multiply unsaturated intermediates, while 7r-allylic species probably participate in the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene over palladium and cobalt, and of 1,2-cyclo-decadiene and 1,2-cyclononadiene over palladium. Here negative evidence is valuable platinum, for example does not form 7T-allylic complexes readily and the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene using platinum does not require the postulate that 7r-allylic intermediates are involved. Since both fields here are fairly well studied it is unlikely that this use of negative evidence will lead to contradiction in the light of future work. 

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