Source: School of Chemistry

Written by: School of Chemistry

Edited by: Wang Dongmei

Compared with homogeneous catalysis, heterogeneous metal catalysis has attracted great attention in chemistry and material science because of both economic and environmental reasons. However, the catalyst tends to aggregate during the cycles of reversible reaction, and for this reason, mesoporous materials such as polymers, dendrimers, silica, and metal oxides are actively investigated to prevent metal agglomeration and stabilize the metal catalytic ability. Although all kinds of metal catalysts with remarkably enhanced activity have been successfully employed, they still have several deficiencies including lack of long-term stability, low dispersibility, deactivation or constant leaching, as well as low recyclability which limit their capacity and applications. Furthermore, the heterogeneous catalysts could not be controlled until the end of the reaction because of the difficult separation between the supporting materials and solvents during the reaction process.

Recently, Professor Zhegang Huang’s group from the School of Chemistry at Sun Yat-sen University has prepared a novel supramolecular nanotubules assembled by alternative stacking from trimeric macrocycles, which was found to be able to coordinate with Pd cations. The Pd complexes exhibited a high catalytic performance for C-C coupling reaction. Notably, the tubular catalyst was observed to be controlled by supramolecular reversible assembly and showed superior heterogeneous catalytic activity maintained for a number of recycles or reuse under aerobic environment. Furthermore, the supramolecular catalyst showed unprecedented selectivity for the multi-functional coupling reaction and was able to serve as a new constructor of asymmetrical compounds.

This work has been published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. The Ph.D. student Shanshan Wu and lecturer Yongguang Li are co-first authors. (Supramolecular Nanotubules as a Catalytic Regulator for Palladium Cations: Applications in Selective Catalysis, Angew. Chem.Int.Ed. 2017. DOI: 10.1002/anie.201706373 )

The research receives support from the Hundred-Talent Program of Sun Yat-sen University and Guangzhou Science Technology and Innovation Commission. Huang’s group has researched on the super-hydrophobic soft mesoporous materials mainly around supramolecular assembly and functionalization, supramolecular catalysis, pollutant adsorption, intelligent drug delivery.

Link to the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201706373/full