4 ms·

Does anyone have insight into what type of silicon product they were creating and it's usefulness (if any)? I'm not sure if I missed it in the article or if it

• FLUX-YOU 12y ago
  >Coauthor Brian Stoltz, professor of chemistry at Caltech, says the reason for this strong response is that while the chemistry the catalyst drives is challenging, potassium tert-butoxide is so seemingly simple. The white, free-flowing powder—similar to common table salt in appearance—provides a straightforward and environmentally friendly way to run a reaction that involves replacing a carbon–hydrogen bond with a carbon–silicon bond to produce molecules known as organosilanes. http://www.caltech.edu/news/potassium-salt-outperforms-precious-metals-catalyst-45464 http://www.caltech.edu/news/potassium-salt-outperforms-preci... Looks like it's for organosilanes (of which I have no clue about) However, the video for this discovery was pretty cool
• scythe 12y ago
  See: http://www.google.com/patents/US20140094607 http://www.google.com/patents/US20140094607 Potassium tert-butoxide (affectionately "KOtBu") isn't any sort of special potassium compound. Basically KOtBu is a really, really strong base, which is called a "non-nucleophilic base" because it doesn't undergo certain kinds of reactions (generally bad ones). In fact according to the patent it isn't required at all; you could use the non-metallic (but very expensive) BEMP or something. The patent concerns the "silylation" of "aromatic" compounds, which is sort of involved but in essence normally one would silylate -> react -> desilylate in order to achieve a reaction that would normally be outcompeted by a faster reaction. It's rare (but not unheard of) that the silylated compound is actually the target, so while I expect such a reaction to be useful, it doesn't seem transformative on its own. However using KOtBu instead of Pd certainly makes anything a lot cheaper, and maybe somebody had every wrinkle ironed out but this one in some process somewhere.
• subnaught 12y ago
  An organosilane is basically any molecule with a Si-C bond. This reaction step creates the Si-C bond, so you could (in theory) use it to prepare any organosilane by starting with the correct Si- and C- containing fragments. Organosilanes currently find wide use in industry as hydrophobic coatings, adhesion promoters, and as useful intermediates in drug synthesis. It's a little hard to describe just how unbelievable this discovery is. Before this, if you were to propose research in this area, you would most likely be laughed at. It's a bit like if you discovered a hard drive could also be used as a microprocessor. In both cases, there seem to be very good reasons why it could never work. In this case, however, those reasons just happened to be wrong. EDIT: Free access to the original paper here: http://rdcu.be/cmm5 http://rdcu.be/cmm5
  • minthd 12y ago
    So what will happen now ? since we no longer know how (some) catalysts work, will this start a race of scanning materials(i.e. combinatorial chemistry) to find catalysts ?
    • ekianjo 12y ago
      > since we no longer know how (some) catalysts work It's not like we ever knew exactly how things work at the molecular level. Chemistry is still an expanding field, there are theories to explain molecular combinations in most cases but there is not fixed, absolute theory behind it that explains everything in every single case. > race of scanning materials(i.e. combinatorial chemistry) to find catalysts What for ? There's tons of literature already available (more than you can absorb in a single lifetime), and experiments need to be carefully planned and understood, and not just randomly thrown at multiple targets.
      • im3w1l 12y ago
        >experiments need to be carefully planned and understood, and not just randomly thrown at multiple targets. Well, if you automated the process...