Venerdì 19 settembre 2025 - Ore 11:30 - Aula Magna
Prof. Rinaldo Poli, Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination, Toulouse, France
  Seminario  

Homogeneous catalysis has advantages in terms of activities and selectivities, but suffers from poor catalyst recovery and recycle. An interesting approach for catalyst recovery is confinement onto a solid surface (heterogenized homogeneous catalysis) or in a different liquid phase (liquid/liquid biphasic catalysis). In the latter case, water is the most attractive catalyst phase. A large-scale, industrially implemented process based on an aqueous liquid/liquid biphasic protocol is the Rh-catalyzed hydroformylation of light olefins. Extension to higher olefins, however, is hampered by the insufficient olefin solubility in water, which limits mass transport. This problem can be alleviated by anchoring the catalyst in the hydrophobic core of micelles, where the water-insoluble substrates can migrate and accumulate at high concentrations. We have introduced a new catalyst support, which consists of core-crosslinked micelles with a hydrophilic shell and a hydrophobic core where the catalyst is firmly anchored. I’ll present the advantages, pitfalls and improvements of this support. I’ll describe the synthesis and characterization of the organized polymers and their application to aqueous biphasic transformations catalyzed by both molecular metal complexes and metallic nanoparticles