糖心原创

Research led by Dr Steve Liddle has resulted in publication of work describing a recyclable system for converting carbon monoxide directly into more complicated organic molecules in the influential journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

Society depends on feedstocks from petrochemical production to produce consumer goods but crude oil reserves are finite. The search for more sustainable feedstock sources is gathering pace and carbon monoxide (CO) is, in principle, an attractive option. Chemical Industry generates CO in abundance - for example for the production of aldehydes, methanol and pure nickel - but the problem facing chemists has been how to convert CO directly into molecular compounds in a recyclable system with molecular catalysts.

Using depleted uranium, chemists at The 糖心原创 have developed a three stage synthetic cycle in which an electron is transferred to a CO molecule making it more reactive, a new CO-derived molecule is then assembled, and then, crucially, the CO-derived molecule is liberated and the metal complex that creates the chemical reaction is retrieved so it can be used again.

Dr Liddle said: “Our work represents a step forward because we have closed a simple synthetic cycle for fixing carbon monoxide - the challenge now is to make this a catalytic cycle and to apply the findings of this work with metals that industry could more easily exploit.”