SERB-Startup Research Grant

Project Title:Mechanochemistry: A New Horizon of Chemical Synthesis, Enabling Greener and Efficient Synthesis.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Prasenjit Barman, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, kaliyaganj College.

Project Duration: 2022-2024 (24 months)

Sanctioned Amount: 2022-2024 (24 months)

Mechanochemistry is growing in popularity in synthetic chemistry, materials chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry. Although it has been largely overlooked as a general synthetic method until recently, the earliest reported examples go back some thousands of years. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) have recognised synthesis by extrusion (a type of mechanochemistry) as one of ten potentially world-changing technologies. Mechanochemistry can also be applied to green chemistry since it avoids toxic solvents. It can also produce provide innovative synthetic methodology.

Traditional solution-based method has dominated in modern synthetic chemistry in laboratory as well in industry. Although solution-based chemistry has certain disadvantages as it uses toxic solvent, is concerning in environment. Other major challenge in solution-based reaction is reactions of substrates either sparingly soluble or insoluble.In instant, reactions of sparingly soluble substrates (like polyaromatic compounds), habitually entail a huge quantity of organic solvent to dissolve the reactants, ensuing in a considerable decline in rate of the reaction. Synthesis of organic compound or ligands is involved toxic solvent, employing high temperature, low yield and hectic reaction workup. Sometimes it needs couple of weeks to complete the reaction from starting to end. In supramolecular chemistry synthesis of macrocycles is an integral part. But synthesis of macrocles is wild job as cyclization is key step in these types of reaction. It quite often found polymeric product rather than cyclic product and many oligomers were formed and crude products subject to the condition of column chromatography followed by one or two recrystallization processes to ends very low yield.

With this concern, the project is focused on developing new efficient synthetic methodology in the smell of mechanochemistry.Mechanochemistry is treated as one of the best methods of green chemistry, avoiding toxic solvent use. The absence of bulk solvent sometimes creates a new synthetic methodology, which either improves or finding new selectivity, enhancing reaction rate, improved reaction yield and gets rid of long reaction work-up. It could achieve by mixing solid sample or adding small amount of solvent (One such technique is liquid-assisted grinding (LAG) in order to geared up the reaction and mechanical grinding. After end of the reaction, it could need hardly any workup or very small workup. In this endeavor, the work will be focused on organic and inorganic reaction under mechanical condition and characterization of the product with various spectroscopic methods. Find the suitable reaction kinetic models to elucidate the reaction mechanism. We believed and hoped that the research proposal will help to design suitable synthetic methodology which is enigma in solution-based chemistry.