Researchers develop a new chemical process: triazenolysis

Researchers at the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion have developed a new chemical process to produce raw materials for the manufacture of polymers, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural compounds. In a paper about the process in Nature Chemistry, the researchers detail how they developed the new process and conducted a computational analysis to explain its mechanisms and key stages. The study was led by doctoral students Alexander Koronatov and Deepak Ranolia, and postdoctoral researcher Pavel Sakharov, under the guidance of Prof. Mark Gandelman.

From left to right: Prof. Mark Gandelman, Aleksandr Koronatov, Pavel Sakharov, Deepak Ranolia

Called triazenolysis, the new process converts alkenes – common organic compounds such as petroleum – into multifunctional amines useful in various research and industrial applications.

The Technion-developed process mimics ozonolysis, a long-established technology used to create molecules with carbon-oxygen bonds. Ozonolysis, developed more than a century ago, is effective at forming carbon-oxygen bonds but does not produce carbon-nitrogen bonds. This is where triazenolysis comes into play, producing carbon-nitrogen bonds relevant to a wide range of applications by cleaving carbon-carbon bonds in olefins (a class of chemicals made up of hydrogen and carbon with one or more pairs of carbon atoms linked by a double bond).

Triazenolysis: making amines by breaking olefins. Image source: Tatyana Savin

The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF).

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