Tungsten Oxide Four-in-one Catalyst Developed
Brown University researchers have developed a new tungsten oxide four-in-one catalyst that can perform four separate chemical reactions in sequential order and in one container to produce compounds useful in making a wide range of pharmaceutical products. "It normally takes multiple catalysts to carry out all of the steps of this reaction," said Chao Yu, a post-doctoral researcher at Brown who co-led the work with graduate student Xuefeng Guo. "But we found a single nanocatalyst that can perform this multistep reaction by itself." The research, described in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, was a collaboration between the labs of Brown professors Christopher Seto and Shouheng Sun, who are coauthors of the paper. The work was done, the researchers said, with an eye toward finding ways of making the chemical industry more environmentally sustainable. Multi-reaction catalysts like this one are a step toward that goal. "If you're r...