Cooking oil as solvents in metal catalysed reactions
We know that, Cooking oil is used in food preparation. It is liquid at room temperature, although some oils that contain saturated fat like Coconut oil, Palm oil and palm kernel oil are solid. Oil can be flavoured with aromatic foodstuffs such as herbs, chillies or Garlic. Cooking oils are composed of various fractions of fatty acids. For Frying food, oils high in monosaturated or saturated fats are generally popular, while oils high in polysaturated fats are less desirable.
But nowadays, cooking oil is not used for only frying, or food preparation it is also used in metal catalysed reactions. Norway scientists proves that -Vegetables oils and similar lipids can change standard natural solvents in plenty of homogenous metal catalysed reactions. There are many different reactions occurs in solution and solvents to produced a big part of the material which is required to produce chemical products. Many closely similar upon solvents in business are drrived from fossil fuels and are pollutants.
Ashot Gevorgyan and co-workers at UiT The Arctic University of Norway decided to test vegetable oils and related lipids as alternative solvents. Vegetable oils are easily available and it is also safe. They share many properties with fossil derived common solvents used in chemicals synthesis and can be reasonable alternatives. Gevorgyan posed that their inertness low volatility, high thermal stability and tuneable polarity could make them ideal solvents for carrying out cross coupling reactions. Oils have been used firstly as extractants and reaction solvents, but until now had nit been used for homogenous metal catalysed reactions which are ubiquitous in fine chemical synthesis.
Suzuki-Miyaura reaction in rape-sees oil; exploratory experiments proves that it worked but gave a low isolated yield. The see that having an effective method for high-throughput screening would expedite optimising the reaction conditions. The nature of vegetable oils meant common purification methods were not amenable. Hence, the analysis and separation of of products which are obtained in vegetable oils needed special type of techniques. Gevorgyan found that NMR spectroscopy could be used to effectively analyze crude reaction mixtures. With this technique, they screened a wide range of lipids from triacetin and sunflower oil, through to beeswax and lanolin.
Whilst maximum oils had been appropriate, vegetable oils most often gave merchandise in virtually quantitative yields. These solvents had been then prolonged to Hiyama, stille, Heck and Sonagashira cross-couplings, which can be all regularly utilized by artificial chemists. In highly cases, the team noticed excessive response efficiencies.
The reaction which is called as cross coupling reactions needed a base. Many strong bases or the water saponified the oils. All of you know about the process of Saponification in which soap is formed. It alters the structure of oils and converts them to a waxy solid. To find out the waste oils potential, the gang fried potatoes in rapeseed oil for about 7-8 hours. After that it us used in reactions. Repeat, the reactions well working.
Cooking oil are non-volatile and also a non-polar, the isolation of common organic solvents was impossible. The researchers utilize that the oils low volatility and used vaccum distillation to extract the final substance or products, though they also had to clarify the product further with conventional Technologiecs. There is used column chromatography also to purifying the products directly from oils with renewable Terpene eluents. The oils could be recovered for repeat use in this two separate techniques.
James Clark which is an expert in green chemistry at the university of York, (UK) said that - the long standing search for solvents has been produced quickly legislation and it is increasingly recognised that we requires new, begin and ideally renewable solvents. The cooking oil or vegetable oils proposed in this study certainly meet different of the main criteria and their applications in some most important organic processes are bestly/ nicely illustrated. While critical issues of reusability and isolation are partly covered, they will remain a concern, as will questions about purity and the concern with the use of food grade compounds. Cooking oils are a welcome addition to the geen solvent toolkit, but their use is likely to be limited to niche applications.
The most important affect cooking oils could have is in organocatalysis and in enzyme study, the place carefully resemble the ones found in residing cells.
