Molecular Catalysis for Carbon Dioxide Incorporation Into Glycerol

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This project addresses fundamental issues in catalysis for carbon dioxide reactivity with glycerol to carbonic esters. Two waste chemicals are, therefore, involved as renewable feedstocks for making high-value products. The perspective is to get an entry for developing CO2-neutral reactions of promising development and increasing importance for the future. Emphasis is put on molecular catalyst design and catalytic reactor optimization to promote the reaction and tune selectivity for glyceric carbonates. To achieve this goal three partners (CNRS, Dortmund University and New University of Lisbon) will share their complementary competences in close collaboration. The new trans-national cooperation will benefit from tightly linked methodologies in molecular catalysis: precatalyst synthesis and characterization, high-pressure catalytic reaction, reaction kinetics, mechanistic studies, reactor technology, and fluid phase thermodynamics. Coordination chemistry of glycerol-based ligands targeting the reactivity with carbon dioxide and relevant mechanistic studies in correlation with catalytic activity have been unexplored. The knowledge acquired during this project will set the rules of metal binding to polyols and CO2 for catalysis. Metal-oxygen bonds are the new key players for oxygenated feedstock transformation, just as metal-carbon bonds dictate the pathways to C-C couplings to produce oligomers and polymers from olefin feedstock. The know-how acquired in reactor technologies and fluid phase thermodynamics will provide the basic requirements for the catalytic process to be performant.