Synthesis and characterization of a new poly α-amino acid Co(II)-complex supported on magnetite graphene oxide as an efficient heterogeneous magnetically recyclable catalyst for efficient free-coreductant gram-scale epoxidation of olefins with molecular oxygen

Abstract

A novel magnetic nanocomposite was prepared by immobilization of a cobalt complex of a synthetic poly α-amino acid on Fe3O4-doped graphene oxide (GO/Fe3O4@PAA Co(II)) and was demonstrated to be a highly efficient catalyst for the epoxidation of olefins in mild conditions. PAA was synthesized through a multi-step synthesis, first by a poly condensation reaction of salicylaldehyde followed by the Strecker synthesis. The synthesized nanocomposite was characterized by various analytical and spectroscopic methods including FTIR, ICP, XRD, EDX, XPS, FE-SEM, TEM, TGA, VSM and DLS analyses. A wide variety of olefins could be tolerated toward epoxidation in the presence of molecular oxygen without the need for any co-reductant. The magnetic nanocomposite could be readily separated by a magnet from the mixture and reused for several times without any significant reactivity loss, which represents its potential for practical and industrial application. Also, the scalability of the process was investigated in this work.