Selective catalysis and nanoscience: an inseparable pair

Rational design of solid catalysts for the selective use of glycerol as a natural organic building block

Glycerol is the main co-product of the vegetable oils industry (especially biodiesel). With the rapid development of oleochemistry, the production of glycerol is rapidly increasing and chemists are trying to find new applications of glycerol to encourage a better industrial development of vegetable oils. In this Review, attention is focused on the selective use of glycerol as a safe organic building block for organic chemistry. An overview is given of the different heterogeneous catalytic routes developed by chemists for the successful and environmentally friendly use of glycerol in sustainable organic chemistry. In particular, the effects of different catalyst structural parameters are discussed to clearly highlight how catalysis can help organic chemists to overcome the drawbacks stemming from the use of glycerol as a safe organic building block. It is shown that heterogeneous catalysis offers efficient routes for bypassing the traditional use of highly toxic and expensive epichlorohydrin, 3-chloro-1,2-propanediol, or glycidol, which are usually used as a glyceryl donor in organic chemistry.

Structure and nuclearity of active sites in Fe-zeolites: comparison with iron sites in enzymes and homogeneous catalysts

Fe-ZSM-5 and Fe-silicalite zeolites efficiently catalyse several oxidation reactions which find close analogues in the oxidation reactions catalyzed by homogeneous and enzymatic compounds. The iron centres are highly dispersed in the crystalline matrix and on highly diluted samples, mononuclear and dinuclear structures are expected to become predominant. The crystalline and robust character of the MFI framework has allowed to hypothesize that the catalytic sites are located in well defined crystallographic positions. For this reason these catalysts have been considered as the closest and best defined heterogeneous counterparts of heme and non heme iron complexes and of Fenton type Fe(2+) homogeneous counterparts. On this basis, an analogy with the methane monooxygenase has been advanced several times. In this review we have examined the abundant literature on the subject and summarized the most widely accepted views on the structure, nuclearity and catalytic activity of the iron species. By comparing the results obtained with the various characterization techniques, we conclude that Fe-ZSM-5 and Fe-silicalite are not the ideal samples conceived before and that many types of species are present, some active and some other silent from adsorptive and catalytic point of view. The relative concentration of these species changes with thermal treatments, preparation procedures and loading. Only at lowest loadings the catalytically active species become the dominant fraction of the iron species. On the basis of the spectroscopic titration of the active sites by using NO as a probe, we conclude that the active species on very diluted samples are isolated and highly coordinatively unsaturated Fe(2+) grafted to the crystalline matrix. Indication of the constant presence of a smaller fraction of Fe(2+) presumably located on small clusters is also obtained. The nitrosyl species formed upon dosing NO from the gas phase on activated Fe-ZSM-5 and Fe-silicalite, have been analyzed in detail and the similarities and differences with the cationic, heme and non heme homogeneous counterparts have been evidenced. The same has been done for the oxygen species formed by N(2)O decomposition on isolated sites, whose properties are more similar to those of the (FeO)(2+) in cationic complexes (included the [(H(2)O)(5)FeO](2+)"brown ring" complex active in Fenton reaction) than to those of ferryl groups in heme and non heme counterparts.