Insights into the decomposition of olefin metathesis precatalysts

The decomposition of a series of benzylidene, methylidene, and 3-phenylindenylidene complexes has been probed in alcohol solution in the presence of base. Tricyclohexylphosphane-containing precatalysts are shown to yield [RuCl(H)(H2)(PCy3)2] in isopropyl alcohol solutions, while 3-phenylindenylidene complexes lead to η5-(3- phenyl)indenyl products. The potential-energy surfaces for the formation of the latter species have been probed using density functional theory studies. © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Sponsors

Research leading to these results has received funding from the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement noCP-FP 211468-2 EUMET. S.P.N. thanks the ERC for an Advanced Investigator Award "FUNCAT" and KAUST for support. S.P.N. is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder. L.C. thanks the HPC team of Enea for using the ENEA-GRID and the HPC facilities CRESCO in Portici (Italy) for access to remarkable computational resources. A.P. thanks the Spanish MINECO for a Ramon y Cajal contract (RYC-2009-05226) and European Commission for a Career Integration Grant (CIG09-GA-2011-293900). We thank Umicore for gifts of materials and ligands.

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[Dataset]
Manzini, S., Poater, A., Nelson, D. J., Cavallo, L., Slawin, A. M. Z., & Nolan, S. P. (2014). CCDC 993125: Experimental Crystal Structure Determination [Data set]. Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5517/cc12bf94. DOI: 10.5517/cc12bf94 HANDLE: 10754/624310

Collections

Articles; Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division; Chemical Science Program; KAUST Catalysis Center (KCC)