Executive Summary : | Alcohols, are one of the most abundant class of chemicals that undergo various types of transformations yielding highly useful chemicals and intermediates that dominate fine chemical industries. Among various transformations, direct conversion of alcohol to carbonyl compounds is one of the most studied processes in organic chemistry. Traditionally, alcohol oxidation is carried out using stoichiometric amounts of inorganic oxidants like permangate, dichromate or hypervalent iodine which are not only toxic but also generate huge amount inorganic wastes. In the past few years, an alternative atom-economical approach has emerged which not only covert alcohols to value-added products without the need of an external oxidant but also produce H2 gas as the side product. In fact, from all aspects this oxidant-free method, so-called acceptorless dehydrogenation (AD), is of highly advantageous. Since H2 gas is liberated as a side product, the reaction has also received unprecedented attentions from the perspective of “hydrogen economy” as the evolved H2 from alcohol could also be utilized as a sustainable energy source. Moreover, literature evidence suggest that this method can convert alcohols via dehydrogenative coupling pathway to value added products including N-containing heterocycles that have broad applications in pharmaceutical domain. In recent years, oxidant-free dehydrogenations of alcohol has been accomplished mostly by precious metal and a few non-precious metal-based homogeneous catalysts. Although, the homogeneous systems often display promising activity and selectivity, they suffer from issues related to product-separation and recyclability, and thus are not sustainable from economical perspectives. Consequently, strategies based on heterogeneous systems are gaining momentum for this particular transformation. However, majority of the reported heterogeneous catalysts produce aldehyde or ketones via single dehydrogenation reaction, while from hydrogen economy viewpoint double dehydrogenation of converting alcohols directly to acids is highly important. To our surprise, examples of heterogeneous catalysts that directly convert alcohols to acids is limited to only three reports only. Hence, designing sustainable catalytic system for AD reactions of alcohol is not only important from academic perspective but also from the quest of global energy demand. It may be noted that in recent years, bimetallic nanostructured materials have gained enormous attentions as synergistic catalysts in many industrially relevant chemical processes. Unfortunately, except one recent example influence of bimetallic synergy remained unexplored in the arena of alcohol dehydrogenation. Hence, one of the principal aims of this project is to design noble heterobimetallic nanostructured catalysts for exploiting dehydrogenatve oxidations of alcohols to value added products. |