Single-Atom Fe-Catalyzed Acceptorless Dehydrogenative Coupling to Quinolines
Yanze Lu1, Meiling Zhu1,2, Sanxia Chen1
1Key Laboratory of Material Chemistry for Energy Conversion and Storage, Ministry of Education, Hubei Key Laboratory of Material Chemistry and Service Failure, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1037 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430074, China.
Abstract:
A single-atom iron catalyst was found to exhibit exceptional reactivity in acceptorless dehydrogenative coupling for quinoline synthesis, outperforming known homogeneous and nanocatalyst systems. Detailed characterizations, including aberration-corrected HAADF-STEM, XANES, and EXAFS, jointly confirmed the presence of atomically dispersed iron centers. Various functionalized quinolines were efficiently synthesized from different amino alcohols and a range of ketones or alcohols. The iron single-atom catalyst achieved a turnover number (TON) of up to 105, far exceeding the results of current homogeneous and nanocatalyst systems. Detailed mechanistic studies verified the significance of single-atom Fe sites in the dehydrogenation process.
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