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Electrochemical oxidation of styrene to benzaldehyde by discrimination of spin-paired π electrons.

Xiaoxue LuoXiaoxia TangJingtian NiBaijing WuCunpu LiMinhua ShaoZidong Wei
Published in: Chemical science (2023)
The oxidation of styrene to benzaldehyde has been a considerable challenge in the electrochemical synthesis of organic compounds because styrene is more easily oxidized to benzoic acid. In this work, MnO 2 with an asymmetric electronic configuration is designed to discriminate the spin-paired π electrons of styrene. One of these discriminated π electrons combined with reactive oxygen species (ROS), ˙OH, ˙OOH, etc. , produced simultaneously on a MnO 2 /(Ru 0.3 Ti 0.7 )O 2 /Ti bifunctional anode, to form benzaldehyde via Grob fragmentation , rather than benzoic acid. However, only benzoic acid is obtained from the oxidation of styrene on the anodes MOs/(Ru 0.3 Ti 0.7 )O 2 /Ti, where MOs are other metal oxides with symmetric electronic configurations.
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