1. Gemini Surfactant Clay Intercalates for Triphase Catalysis Nahid Shabestary, Department of Chemistry, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Phase-transfer catalysis (PTC) has emerged in the past few decades as an extremely powerful methodology for the synthesis of various classes of compounds. Many important industrial products such as pharmaceuticals, polymers, agricultural chemicals, specialty chemicals, and fine organic chemicals are manufactured using PTC. Our research is focused on triphase catalysis (TC) which is a unique form of PTC where three distinct phases are used in the reaction including a solid phase which makes it easy to separate the catalyst from the product by simple filtration or centrifugation as the catalyst is anchored to the solid phase. We have successfully synthesized and utilized a novel class of Gemini-intercalated clay catalysts in triphase catalysis to study the kinetics of a nucleophilic displacement reaction converting n-butyl bromide to n-butyl chloride. n-butBr (org) + Cl - (aq)  Gemini Clay Intercalates  n-butCl (org) + Br - (aq)