Proceedings of Materials for Sustainable Development Conference (MAT-SUS) (NFM22)
Publication date: 11th July 2022
Nitriles are interesting class of organic compounds included in a wide variety of natural products and industrial processes. Typical routes to prepare nitriles proceed with low atom economy, require toxic reagents, and/or have limited selectivity. An alternative synthesis to produce nitriles relies on primary amine oxidation by organic electrosynthesis. Organic electrosynthesis allows the replacement of dangerous and toxics chemicals, as well as reducing the amount of hazard solvents by applying only current. One of the main aims in electrosynthesis is the achievement of stable and robust electrodes. Here, we report the use of a facile alternative process to synthetize electrodes via electrodeposition of a nickel salt on different supports for the electrooxidation of amines to nitriles.
In the electrooxidation of primary amines to nitriles with Ni based electrodes, hydrogen in produced at the cathode, whereas de amine is oxidized at the anode due to the redox par Ni2+/Ni3+ formed at the anode. We have screened the electrooxidatiohn of different aromatic and aliphatic primary amines using different nickel-based electrodes: Ni foil (NiF), Ni foam (NF), Ni electrodeposited on NF (NieNF) and Ni electrodeposited on graphite pencil rod (NieGPR). The best results were obtained in terms of yields (>95%) and substrate tolerance with NieNF. In addition, the proposed electrodes compared with Ni/Se reported in the literature [1] have a great benefit because allow reducing by half the reaction time for the amine complete oxidation.
To sum up, the current project paves the way to produce both nitriles and H2 with low cost and high efficiency, thus grasping great potentials in the future energy conversion and storage technologies, sustainable environmental issues and beyond.
We thank project PID2020-116093RB-C41, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, projects IDIFEDER/2020/013 and PROMETEO/2020/02 funded by Generalitat Valenciana and project UJI-B2019-20 funded by University Jaume I.
The authors thank Servicio Central de Instrumentación Científica (SCIC) from Universitat Jaume I.