alkanes tagged posts

Scientists have come up with a way to turn the most common form of plastic into liquid fuel.

A new way of recycling millions of tons of plastic garbage into liquid fuel has been devised by researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) in China. “Synthetic plastics are a fundamental part of modern life, but our use of them in large volume has created serious environmental problems,” said UCI chemist Zhibin Guan. “Our goal through this research was to address the issue of plastic pollution as well as achieving a beneficial outcome of creating a new source of liquid fuel.”

Guan and Zheng Huang, his collaborator at SIOC et al have figured out how to break down the strong bonds of polyethylene, the most common commercially available...

Phenanthroline ligands used in the borylation of methane. Credit: IBS

Using a new hybrid breed of computational and experimental chemistry, an international team of chemists was able to solve a puzzle that has been dubbed a ‘Holy Grail reaction’ and devise a method for catalyzing reactions with methane. As organic chemistry evolved, techniques for catalyzing hydrocarbons advanced and one by one a method was created for their manipulation. Ethane, propane, butane, pentane – all the alkanes followed a similar pattern and their reactions had predictable results. Only one alkane-methane- refused to follow suit and this confounded chemists for decades. Methane had been just too difficult to work with; its C-H bond could not be manipulated...