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Catalyst caught on tape

Chemists regard tape made of DuPont s Teflon as an indispensable sealer for lab equipment, but according to researchers in Germany, Teflon tape may be just as useful inside a reaction flask. John A. Gladysz and Long V. Dinh of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg have discovered that Teflon tape is surprisingly effective at introducing and recovering homogeneous fluorous catalysts from a reaction mixture (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2005, 44, 4095). Thermomorphic fluorous catalysts dissolve in organic solvents only at elevated temperatures, so chemists usually have to heat their reaction mixtures to get the catalyst into solution and then cool and decant the mixture to recover the catalyst. Gladysz and Dinh found that if they added Teflon tape to a ketone hydrosilylation reaction featuring a fluorous rhodium catalyst, the reaction could proceed with much less catalyst. Upon cooling, the catalyst clung to the tape so that the chemists could fish it out of the mixture. The researchers speculate that their findings could lead to industrial-scale reactors or reactor components that use Teflon to release and recapture certain fluorous catalysts.




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