Organosilicon compounds are in demand because of their ability to withstand incredible thermal and mechanical stress which makes these silicones useful in sealing and protecting many items in aircraft and rocket construction and other applications in medicine, food industry. Scientists still believe that their usability has not been fully realized due to one of the central problems in the modern chemistry of silicones, namely, the synthesis of organosilicon products with a “polar” (-C(O)OH, -OH, -NH2, etc.) functional group in an organic substituent.
Such a moiety allows the easy introduction of other substituents, and the ability to tune the compound to repel water or to form stable aqueous emulsions, and to impart other “super-capabilities” to a material. This opens quite unique prospects for subsequent modification of these compounds in order to synthesize new copolymers, self-healing and conductive materials, and compounds for storage and delivery of drugs and fuels. Just a small modification of a compound would also allow one to solve the problem of low mechanical strength and incompatibility of silicones with polymers, such as polyesters and others.
A team of scientists from A.N. Nesmeyanov Institute of Organoelement Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INEOS RAS), in collaboration with colleagues from the Russian Federation, used a combination of metallic and organic catalysts to solve these problems. The reaction conditions were softened and high process selectivity was achieved. The reaction involved molecular oxygen in liquid phase at temperatures slightly above the room temperature. The method can be scaled to gram amounts in order to produce a required compound.
