Microcrystalline Cellulose Decorated with Fe3O4 Nanoparticle Catalysts for the Microwave-Assisted Synthesis of Thioglyoxamides

Abstract

Ferrite nanoparticles (Fe3O4 NPs) supported on microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) are introduced as an active nanocatalyst for the preparation of the α-keto thioglyoxamides via a microwave (MW)-assisted protocol. This prepared catalyst shows consistent particle size of Fe3O4 NPs as characterized by PXRD, XPS, SEM, EDS, EDX, TEM, HR-TEM, and FT-IR analysis. A wide variety of thioglyoxamindes are synthesized under optimized reaction conditions to afford a good yield in a short time. Importantly, the presented catalyst can be recycled up to five cycles with no major loss in its activity and is equally relevant for the gram-scale synthesis of thioglyoxamides. This environmentally benign approach offers several advantages and displays good green chemistry metrics (GCM), namely, process mass intensity (PMI), E-factor and atom economy (AE), and reaction mass efficiency (RME).