Research | KKBania

Salient Research Outcome
In the last ten years of research experience in zeolites, our research group has been able to design various chiral and achiral heterogeneous supported catalyst for various catalytic reactions. Most significant achievement has been obtained in the synthesis of heterogeneous chiral metal Schiff base complexes for asymmetric Henry reactions. Our group probably reported the first case of asymmetric Henry reactions by chiral “Ship in A Bottle complexes”. In recent times our group has been able to design various zeolite-Y supported Pd-based bimetallic nanocatalysts for Suzuki-Miyuara cross coupling reactions. Out of which Pd-Ni-Y catalyst exhibited high reactivity for C-Cl bond activation in SMCC reactions. The same catalyst while coupled with MWCNT showed high durability in methanol oxidation reactions. Our work on the replacement of acetaldehyde in Cross-Cannizzaro reaction for synthesis of cinnamaldehydes by ethanol was a novel one. Pd-Au-Y nanocatalyst was first reported to be the catalyst for such reaction that helped the insitu oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde and its condensation with benzaldehydes.
Apart from these catalytic reactions our group is also involved in synthesis of silver-based nanocatalysts for water purification reactions. The Ag/AgCl/VOx nanocatalysts with high surface area exhibited high reactivity for complete mineralization of various dye contaminants from water under sunlight. Besides this cyanide is considered to be one of the poisonous inorganic ions present in water. The use of NaCN or KCN in gold and silver mining is continuously releasing CN- to the environment. Therefore, looking into the hazardous impact and our continuous endeavors for replacing CN- in silver extraction process, we have recently developed a green technique for extraction of silver without the use of poisonous NaCN or KCN.
The decrease in fossils fuels has also pushed the researchers to find alternate green fuel. Hydrogen fuel generation from water is among the one of the cleanest techniques. Very recently we demonstrated the activity of gold-sulphide nanocluster supported on vanadium oxide as the efficient catalysts for complete water splitting reactions. All these works have been duly published in highly reputed journals like ACS-Catalysis, Chem. Comm, ACS-Applied Materials and Interface, Journal of Materials Chemistry-A etc. which are provided in the list of publications