Photocatalytic Carbon-Carbon Bond-Forming Reactions with Earth-Abundant Metal Catalysts
Around 2010, it was discovered that new chemical reactions could be driven by light. The chemicals used to harness and transfer the energy of the light, called photocatalysts, are typically based on expensive, rare metals such as rhodium or iridium, however. There has therefore been a drive in the last years to try and discover photocatalysts based on earth-abundant metals such as iron and copper which can carry out the same function. The work in this thesis describes the efforts carried out to try and replace the well-established photocatalysts with ones based on copper. The copper photocatalysts were tested to see if they could drive the same reactions, and it was found that copper photocatalysts were able to drive a particular reaction, an allylation of imines, making it a cheaper alternative to the previously established method. Apart from the efforts to examine the potential of photocatalysts based on earth-abundant metals, work was also carried out to use two already established light-driven reactions in tandem to produce valuable chemicals. There is a need for more work to develop the method, but it was tested and found to work in practice, and it has the potential to become an important method to synthesize chemicals that would otherwise be hard to produce.
Principal Supervisor:
Professor Robert Madsen, DTU Chemistry
Co-supervisor:
Professor Mads Hartvig Clausen, DTU Chemistry
Examiners:
Associate Professor Søren Kramer, DTU Chemistry
Professor Daniel Strand, Lund University, Sweden
Professor Michael Pittelkow, University of Copenhagen
Chairperson:
Professor Sebastian Meier, DTU Chemistry
A copy of the PhD thesis is available for reading at the department.