Development of Green and Sustainable Chemical Reactions

Abstract This thesis entitled Development of Green and Sustainable Chemical Reactions is divided into six chapters involving topics and projects related to green and sustainable chemistry. The chapters can be read independently, however a few concepts and some background information is introduced in chapter one and two which can be helpful to know when reading the subsequent chapters. The first chapter is an introduction into the fundamentals of green and sustainable chemistry. The second chapter gives an overview of some of the most promising methods to produce value added chemicals from biomass as well as the possibility for establishing a renewable chemical industry is discussed. The development of a procedure for using unsaturated aldehydes as olefin synthons in the Diels- Alder reaction is described in chapter three. This procedure affords good yields of the desired Diels- Alder adducts and only leads to small amounts of waste formation due to the all-catalytic nature of the procedure. This chapter involves the use of transition metal catalysis as well as classic organic chemistry. In chapter four, supported gold nanoparticles are used as catalysts for the aerobic oxidation of primary alcohols and aldehydes to afford methyl esters directly. The developed procedure is applied to several substrates that can be made from biomass resources and as a result, some new biomass derived products are made available using gold nanoparticle catalyzed oxidations. In chapter five the development of a procedure for converting triose sugars into lactic acid and methyl lactate is described. Conventional and Lewis acidic zeolites are used as catalysts for this transformation and this procedure illustrates how zeolite catalysis can play an important role in the production of value added chemicals from biomass. Finally, a brief summary and outlook is given in chapter six.