Xinyuan Fan, PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Miquel A. Pericàs, has defended his PhD Thesis entitled “Towards More Sustainable Chemical Processes: Studies on Covalent and Non-covalent Catalyst Immobilization” (assigned to the Organic and Analytical Chemistry Department of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili) publicly on September 5th at the ICIQ auditorium.

The members or his evaluation committee were: Prof. Antonio M. Echavarren (ICIQ), Prof. Albert Moyano (University of Barcelona) and Prof. Patrick J. Walsh (University of Pennsylvania).

 

Abstract:

The present thesis describes three means to achieve sustainable catalytic processes: design and synthesis of effective homogeneous catalysts, development of reusable heterogeneous catalysts, development of precatalysts or one pot multistep cascade models for convenient transformations.

General introduction in Chapter 1 is to familiarize the readers with the concepts, background and mechanisms used in this thesis. This is followed by Chapter 2, which describes α-amination of aldehydes catalyzed by a reusable polymer supported diphenylprolinol silyl ether, and its application in continuous flow processes. Two examples in Chapter 3 demonstrate cascade reactions facilitated by site-isolated catalysts. Development of a novel and effective organocatalyst is described in Chapter 4. Finally, in Chapter 5, a convenient precatalyst for Shibasaki’s bifunctional catalysts is developed, while studying in parallel the effect of supported ligands to anchor these catalysts.