On April 20, 2023, our colleague Marcelo Echeverri, researcher from our coordinator entity FUNDITEC, introduced the CATCO2NVERS project during the Conference on CO2-Based Fuels & Chemicals 2023.
There, Marcelo gave a presentation in the framework of Valuable chemicals from CO2 and renewable feedstocks, a polyimine-based heterogeneous catalysts approach where he talked about how Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a valuable renewable feedstock to produce sustainable chemicals and materials.
The use of CO2 as a starting material and reagent for chemical synthesis require overcoming some limitations such as its high thermodynamic stability. Heterogeneous catalysts based on porous organic polymers (POPs) show potential for tuning their catalytic properties due to their tunable pore structure and range of chemical functional groups that can be introduced. Here, Marcelo explained that polyamine-based heterogeneous catalysts were developed for the carbonation of epoxidized molecules derived from renewable feedstocks, such as vegetable oils.
The developed polyimine metal complexes resulted in efficient catalysts for vegetable oils transformation to cyclic carbonates with conversions of up to 99% in only 16 hours and good recyclability up to 5 cycles.” These catalysts have the potential for the development of sustainable polymeric materials that could fulfil the requirements of a circular economy.
