Quantifying the efficiency of CO2 capture by Lewis pairs

Jay J. Chi; Timothy C. Johnstone; Dan Voicu; Paul Mehlmann; Fabian Dielmann; Eugenia Kumacheva; Douglas W. Stephan

doi:10.1039/C6SC05607E

Quantifying the efficiency of CO₂ capture by Lewis pairs†

Jay J. Chi,^a Timothy C. Johnstone,^a Dan Voicu,^a Paul Mehlmann,^b Fabian Dielmann,

^b Eugenia Kumacheva*^a and Douglas W. Stephan

*^a

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* Corresponding authors

^a Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H6, Canada
E-mail: dstephan@chem.utoronto.ca

^b Institut für Anorganische und Analytische Chemie, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Corrensstrasse 30, 48149 Münster, Germany

Abstract

A microfluidic strategy has been used for the time- and labour-efficient evaluation of the relative efficiency and thermodynamic parameters of CO₂ binding by three Lewis acid/base combinations, where efficiency is based on the amount of CO₂ taken up per binding unit in solution. Neither tBu₃P nor B(C₆F₅)₃ were independently effective at CO₂ capture, and the combination of the imidazolin-2-ylidenamino-substituted phosphine (NIiPr)₃P and B(C₆F₅)₃ was equally ineffective. Nonetheless, an archetypal frustrated Lewis pair (FLP) comprised of tBu₃P and B(C₆F₅)₃ was shown to bind CO₂ more efficiently than either the FLP derived from tetramethylpiperidine (TMP) and B(C₆F₅)₃ or the highly basic phosphine (NIiPr)₃P. Moreover, the proposed microfluidic platform was used to elucidate the thermodynamic parameters for these reactions.

This article is part of the themed collection: CSC100: Celebrating Canadian Chemistry

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Article information

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/C6SC05607E
Article type: Edge Article
Submitted: 21 Kax 2016
Accepted: 17 Nah 2017
First published: 20 Nah 2017
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry

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Chem. Sci., 2017,8, 3270-3275

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Quantifying the efficiency of CO₂ capture by Lewis pairs

J. J. Chi, T. C. Johnstone, D. Voicu, P. Mehlmann, F. Dielmann, E. Kumacheva and D. W. Stephan, Chem. Sci., 2017, 8, 3270 DOI: 10.1039/C6SC05607E

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