Cardiff University researchers are paving a new way to use hydrocarbon raw materials for the production of a variety of important products.
Hydrocarbons are an extremely important energy resource, but despite their high availability fossil fuels are difficult to activate in chemical reactions and their use requires very high temperatures in existing commercial processes.
The Cardiff University study showed, for the first time ever, that the carbon-hydrogen bonds in the material toluene (the most common hydrocarbon in industry) can be selectively activated at low temperatures.
Professor Graham Hutchings, one of the research partners says: "One of the key challenges facing chemists today is the ability to activate primary hydrogen-carbon bonds in hydrocarbons to create more active and useful molecules. This ability is essential for the sustainable utilization of useful industrial raw materials.
"In our research we were able to achieve unprecedented utilizations for the acceptance of a single product at a level of 90%. We achieved this result by using a gold catalyst, a very surprising finding in view of the fact that gold is the most stable element among the elements known to mankind."
These findings promote the ability to use hydrocarbon raw materials in a new way to obtain intermediates and final products that can be used in the chemical, pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors.
