Title : Green solvents as a new tool for olefin metathesis

Abstract:

Olefin metathesis plays an important role in the field of pharmaceuticals, materials and petrochemical processes. Olefin metathesis is a catalytic process which involves a pair of carbon-carbon double bonds to be rearranged in order to form new products. This can be more valuable compared to the starting ones. Generally for this reaction halogenated solvents (chloroform, dichloromethane), aromoatics (benzene, toluene), THF are used. Due to the success of olefin metathesis in large scale industries, more greener solvents are desired to decrease the environmental impacts of this transformation process. In this work, we have studied the effect of green solvents compared to dichloromethane on ring-opening metathesis polymerisation (ROMP), ring-closing metathesis (RCM) and isomerization reactions with three commonly used ruthenium based Grubbs type catalysts in olefin metathesis. To compare the conditions and catalysts, kinetic measurements have been carried out for all the reactions using 1H NMR. Besides, the polymers obtained by ROMP were characterized by gel permeation chromatography (GPC). The green solvents were proved to be very effective tool in the reactions carried out in our model experiments.

Biography:

Dr. Ervin Kovács studied chemical engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary where he received his MSc and his PhD degree (2015). After three years postdoctoral fellowship at the Metathesis Research Group at Research Center of Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary he joined to the group of Prof. Michael Greaney at School of Chemistry, University of Manchester, UK as a postdoctoral research associate. Dr. Ervin Kovács obtained the position of Research Associate in 2019 in Polymer Chemistry Research Group, Research Center of Natural Sciences, Hungary.