Towards the engineering of enantioselective properties of supported platinum catalysts

Abstract

Understanding the sub-molecular structure of conformationally complex adsorbed molecules is still a difficult task for experimentalists interested in the structure of modified surfaces, therefore first principles calculations can be a fundamental tool for the investigation of structural details otherwise impossible to identify. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations of the adsorption of cinchonidine (CD) and O-phenyl-cinchonidine (OPhCD) have been performed, using large metal clusters to simulate the metal surface and a zero order regular approximation (ZORA) Hamiltonian to account for relativistic effects due to the heavy nuclei involved. The local geometry of chiral surface sites formed by CD was investigated in detail and discussed in relation to the reaction of enantioselective hydrogenation of activated ketones on cinchona modified platinum. Also, the relevant conformations of OPhCD were investigated and the resulting structure of the chiral sites is discussed and compared to those obtained for the parent alkaloid CD. The adsorption behavior on platinum of a series of substituted anisoles was also investigated, in order to evince the effect that phenyl substitution might have on the relative proportion of surface conformers in substituted OPhCD ethers, that have been shown to possess interesting enantioswitching properties when used as surface modifiers in the enantioselective hydrogenation of activated ketones on cinchona alkaloid modified platinum. A correlation between conformational distribution of the modifiers and the selectivity of the catalyst is proposed.