| Summary: |
Active pharmaceutical ingredients, agrochemicals, nutrition components, flavors and fragrances are key compounds for society development, in which the cost-effective and environmental-safe production have gained increasingly importance in their corresponding industries.
Heterogeneous photocatalysis has been extensively applied to environment cleanup and has been pointed out as one of the most promising routes for chemical synthesis. Compared to conventional processes, photocatalytic synthesis present massive advantages such as operation under mild temperature conditions, exempt of using hazard oxidant/reducing agents and the prospect of using sunlight or artificial irradiation sources with low energy consumption for reaction activation.
Graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) is a semiconductor with a structure similar to graphene, which presents a bandgap lower than the benchmark photocatalyst TiO2, making it visible-light active. It has been successfully used as metal-free photocatalyst for water treatment and for H2 production, but scarcely explored for photocatalytic organic synthesis.
This project aims at developing metal-free catalysts, based on g-C3N4, for the photocatalytic synthesis of fine chemicals of commercial interest such as imines, alcohols and azoaromatics. The main lines of action are: i) synthesis, modification and characterization of g-C3N4 materials; ii) selective photocatalytic synthesis of organic chemicals by oxidative and reductive routes; and iii) development of continuous-flow photocatalytic reactors. |