Herein, we report on the facile synthesis of a heterogeneous copper nanocatalyst and its combination with 2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-1-piperidinyloxy (TEMPO) for the aerobic oxidation of alcohols to their corresponding carbonyl compounds. This low cost copper nanocatalyst was found to exhibit excellent recyclability, making it a highly attractive catalytic system from an economical and environmental point of view. Extensive characterization of the catalyst by a number of techniques revealed that it was comprised of well-dispersed Cu(I/II) nanoparticles with an average size of around 6nm.

The present work shows that it is possible to ring-open cyclic carbonates with unprotected amino acids in water. Fine tuning of the reaction parameters made it possible to suppress the degree of hydrolysis in relation to aminolysis. This enabled the synthesis of functionally dense carbamates containing alkenes, carboxylic acids, alcohols and thiols after short reaction times at room temperature. When Glycine was used as the nucleophile in the ring-opening with four different five membered cyclic carbonates, containing a plethora of functional groups, the corresponding carbamates could be obtained in excellent yields (> 90%) without the need for any further purification. Furthermore, the orthogonality of the transformation was explored through ring-opening of divinylenecarbonate with unprotected amino acids equipped with nucleophilic side chains, such as serine and cysteine. In these cases the reaction selectively produced the desired carbamate, in 70 and 50% yield respectively. The synthetic design provides an inexpensive and scalable protocol towards highly functionalized building blocks that are envisioned to find applications in both the small and macromolecular arena.

Herein we report the synthesis of mesoporous ruthenium oxide (MP-RuO2) using a template-based approach. The catalytic efficiency of the prepared MP-RuO2 was compared to commercially available ruthenium oxide nanoparticles (C-RuO2) as heterogeneous catalysts for water oxidation. The results demonstrated superior performance of MP-RuO2 for oxygen evolution compared to the C-RuO2 with respect to recyclability, amount of generated oxygen, and stability over several catalytic runs.