Asymmetric epoxidation of 6-cyano-2,2-dimethylchromene on Mn(salen) catalyst immobilized in mesoporous materials

This article reports our recent work on the heterogeneous asymmetric epoxidation catalyzed by chiral Mn(salen) catalyst axially immobilized via phenoxyl groups and organic sulfonic groups. The asymmetric epoxidation of 6-cyano-2,2-dimethylchromene was especially presented in detail. The factors that affected the asymmetric induction, such as the nanopores and the external surface, the linkage length, and the modification of nanopores with methyl groups were discussed. It was found that the enantioselectivities increased with decreasing the nanopore sizes or increasing the linkage length in nanopore, and the Mn(salen) catalyst immobilized into nanopores generally gave higher ee values than those on the external surface. The heterogeneous Mn(salen) catalysts with modified nanopores gave a TOF of 14.8 h⁻¹ and an ee value of 90.6% for the asymmetric epoxidation of 6-cyano-2,2-dimethylchromene, which were higher than the results (TOF 10.8 h⁻¹, ee 80.1%) obtained for the homogeneous catalyst.