Highly active iron precatalyst for hydrosilylation of ketones and aldehydes using industrially viable silanes - Phase I

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Catalysts can accelerate chemical reactions and/or bias the formation of certain products over the others. Such a technology enables many chemical transformations that have impacted numerous aspects of our society. For example, the preparations of many pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and petrochemical products rely on the use of catalysts at various stages of the production processes. The reduction of ketones and aldehydes into the corresponding alcohols is a useful chemical transformation in many chemical syntheses. This transformation is commonly done with expensive and/or hazardous reducing reagents in industry. As an alternative, the catalytic hydrosilylation can be used to reduce ketones and aldehydes into alcohols, especially when the silane used in this process is non-hazardous and inexpensive under mild conditions. The requested funding is to further develop the catalysts invented by our group toward catalytic hydrosilyation of ketones and aldehydes using the non-hazardous and least expensive silane at ambient temperature. The goal of this research is to develop a synthetic protocol of the novel catalysts for large scale production at lower cost for industrial applications. Our catalysts use iron instead of the expensive and toxic noble metals and have extremely high catalytic activity. The proposed work aims to bridge the gap between the research lab discovery and the large-scale manufacture processes in industry.