Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#2Does anyone have insight into what type of silicon product they were creating and it's usefulness (if any)? I'm not sure if I missed it in the article or if it just wasn't there.
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#3What an incredibly irritating article to read.
Can someone find a more normal article on this, that just says what the catalyst does, and leaves out the "birthing story" and other nonsense.
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#4Does anyone have insight into what type of silicon product they were creating and it's usefulness (if any)? I'm not sure if I missed it in the article or if it just wasn't there.
>Coauthor Brian Stoltz, professor of chemistry at Caltech, says the reason for this strong response is that while the chemistry the catalyst drives is challenging, potassium tert-butoxide is so seemingly simple. The white, free-flowing powder—similar to common table salt in appearance—provides a straightforward and environmentally friendly way to run a reaction that involves replacing a carbon–hydrogen bond with a carbon–silicon bond to produce molecules known as organosilanes.
http://www.caltech.edu/news/potassium-salt-outperforms-preci...
Looks like it's for organosilanes (of which I have no clue about)
However, the video for this discovery was pretty cool
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#5Does anyone have insight into what type of silicon product they were creating and it's usefulness (if any)? I'm not sure if I missed it in the article or if it just wasn't there.
See:
http://www.google.com/patents/US20140094607
Potassium tert-butoxide (affectionately "KOtBu") isn't any sort of special potassium compound. Basically KOtBu is a really, really strong base, which is called a "non-nucleophilic base" because it doesn't undergo certain kinds of reactions (generally bad ones). In fact according to the patent it isn't required at all; you could use the non-metallic (but very expensive) BEMP or something.
The patent concerns the "silylation" of "aromatic" compounds, which is sort of involved but in essence normally one would silylate -> react -> desilylate in order to achieve a reaction that would normally be outcompeted by a faster reaction. It's rare (but not unheard of) that the silylated compound is actually the target, so while I expect such a reaction to be useful, it doesn't seem transformative on its own. However using KOtBu instead of Pd certainly makes anything a lot cheaper, and maybe somebody had every wrinkle ironed out but this one in some process somewhere.
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#6What an incredibly irritating article to read. Can someone find a more normal article on this, that just says what the catalyst does, and leaves out the "birthing story" and other nonsense.
I didn't find it irritating at all, but perhaps you would prefer this article: http://phys.org/news/2015-02-cheap-abundant-chemical-outperf...
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#7Does anyone have insight into what type of silicon product they were creating and it's usefulness (if any)? I'm not sure if I missed it in the article or if it just wasn't there.
An organosilane is basically any molecule with a Si-C bond. This reaction step creates the Si-C bond, so you could (in theory) use it to prepare any organosilane by starting with the correct Si- and C- containing fragments. Organosilanes currently find wide use in industry as hydrophobic coatings, adhesion promoters, and as useful intermediates in drug synthesis.
It's a little hard to describe just how unbelievable this discovery is. Before this, if you were to propose research in this area, you would most likely be laughed at. It's a bit like if you discovered a hard drive could also be used as a microprocessor. In both cases, there seem to be very good reasons why it could never work. In this case, however, those reasons just happened to be wrong.
EDIT: Free access to the original paper here: http://rdcu.be/cmm5
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#8The Caltech student newspaper interviewed some of the researchers involved: http://loridajose.com/?p=249
Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#9Re: Student creates powerful catalyst from potassium
#10Does anyone have insight into what type of silicon product they were creating and it's usefulness (if any)? I'm not sure if I missed it in the article or if it just wasn't there.
An organosilane is basically any molecule with a Si-C bond. This reaction step creates the Si-C bond, so you could (in theory) use it to prepare any organosilane by starting with the correct Si- and C- containing fragments. Organosilanes currently find wide use in industry as hydrophobic coatings, adhesion promoters, and as useful intermediates in drug synthesis. It's a little hard to describe just how unbelievable t…
So what will happen now ? since we no longer know how (some) catalysts work, will this start a race of scanning materials(i.e. combinatorial chemistry) to find catalysts ?