Chiral porous hybrid solids for practical heterogeneous asymmetric hydrogenation of aromatic ketones

Chiral porous zirconium phosphonates containing Ru-BINAP-DPEN moieties were synthesized via a molecular building-block approach, and characterized by a variety of techniques including TGA, adsorption isotherms, XRD, SEM, IR, and microanalysis. These hybrid solids were used for enantioselective heterogeneous asymmetric hydrogenation of aromatic ketones with remarkably high ee values of up to 99.2%. These solid catalysts can also be easily recycled and reused for eight times without the loss of activity and enantioselectivity. Ready tunability of such a molecular building-block approach will allow the optimization of these hybrid materials and promise to lead to other practically useful heterogeneous asymmetric catalysts.