Mechanosynthesis, Mechanocatalysis And Photomechanochemistry – MechCat

Mechanochemistry is an important tool for organic chemistry, allowing to reduce environmental impact of reactions by reducing the quantities of solvent used, enhancing reaction rates and sometimes giving rise to unattainable compounds in solution. Additionally, grinding using ball-mill is a scalable technology since high capacity ball-mills are already at use in the alloy or pigment industry. In the project MechCat, we envision to perform organometallic synthesis, catalysis and photoinduced reactions in a ball-mill. Those approaches will permit to obtain a sustainable toolbox and to prove that mechanochemistry can become the method of choice in these 3 domains of research. A first task will allow to generate efficiently two families of transition metal complexes. Several linchpins will be addressed during this task such as one-pot multi-step synthesis of organometallic species with solid/gas interactions in the ball-mill using commercially available milling jars. The planned strategy should give access to numerous complexes in the two families. The isolated complexes will then be evaluated, in the ball-mill, as catalysts for redox and C-H activation reactions. Both reactions are important as the former will produce essential functional groups as well as hydrogen from readily available substrates and the latter could become the alternative to traditional cross-couplings. In a final task, we envision to perform photoredox mechanochemical reactions by concomitant grinding and irradiating. The model reaction will be ultimately valorized with the production of interesting polycyclic structures.