A team of Yale chemists have found a way to combine atmospheric nitrogen with benzene to make aniline, which is a precursor used to make a variety of synthetic products. Their study has been published in journal Nature.
Yale chemistry professor Patrick Holland, senior author of the study and his colleagues used an iron compound to break down one of the chemical bonds in benzene. They also treated the nitrogen with a silicon compound that allowed the nitrogen to combine with benzene.
“Fundamentally, we’re showing a new way of thinking about how to encourage nitrogen to form new bonds that may be adaptable to making other products,” Holland said. He added that the previous attempts by other researchers to combine atmospheric nitrogen and benzene failed since those attempts used highly reactive derivatives of benzene that would degrade before they could produce a chemical reaction with nitrogen.
