The poster describes her work on catalytic non-radical air oxidation of cyclohexene. This allylic oxidation keeps the double bond while creating a new alcohol or carbonyl function. However, the reaction is far from straightforward. Oxygen has a high oxygen activation barrier due to resonance stabilisation, and often unwanted over-oxidation products appear.

Nanocatalysts

To overcome these hurdles Ilse Denekamp studied the allylic oxidation of cyclohexene with O₂ under mild conditions in the presence of transition‐metal catalysts consisting of nanometric metal oxide particles supported on porous N‐doped carbons. In particular the Co@N:C and Cu@N:C catalysts showed a high performance. The research revealed that while the former involves a traditional free-radical process, the latter facilitates activation of oxygen at the catalyst surface followed by a surface reaction with adsorbed cyclohexenyl hydroperoxide molecules.

Paper

The research has been published as an open-access paper in ChemCatChem:

Ilse M. Denekamp, Martijn Antens, Thierry K. Slot and Prof. Gadi Rothenberg: Selective Catalytic Oxidation of Cyclohexene with Molecular Oxygen: Radical Versus Nonradical Pathways. ChemCatChem 2018, 10, 1035–1041
DOI: 10.1002/cctc.201701538