Chemical Sciences Seminars

Organometallic Catalysis for Energy & Environment: What we can achieve

by Dr. Amit Kumar (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)

Wednesday, June 19, 2019 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at AG-80
Description
We are living in the age where we have witnessed critical rise in all types of pollution and the depletion of limited supply of fossil fuel. A lot of it is caused by the way our industries manufacture their products and our dependence on fossil fuel for the production of energy. In order to restore the balance of clean environment we need to develop production methods that are environmentally-benign, atom-economic and sustainable. This lecture will focus on some of the strategy in Green Catalysis that can be utilized for the production of industrially useful chemicals and energy storage materials from inexpensive and readily available starting materials. For example: (a) Based on our recent discovery,1 utilization of alkali or alkaline earth-metal catalysts instead of transition-metal catalysts can make the overall process cheaper and sustainable. (b) Development of reversible chemical hydrogen storage materials such as those based on glycerols or amine-boranes2. (c) Chemical recycling of robust plastics such as nylons, polycarbonates and polyurethanes using ruthenium catalyzed hydrogenative depolymerization method.
 
1.      A. Kumar, T. Janes, S. Chakraborty, P. Daw, N. von Wolff, R. Carmieli, Y. Diskin-Posner, D. Milstein, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2019, 58, 3373.
2.     A. Kumar, N. Beatie, S. A. Macgregor, A. S. Weller, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2016, 55, 6551.