Chemists find new role for old compound

Miller

The findings published recently in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie are part of a research program in combinatorial chemistry, a field where chemists create and screen thousands or even millions of compounds simultaneously for a given application. A paper by post-doctoral researcher Anitha Hari and Benjamin Miller, assistant professor of chemistry, shows how chromium chloride makes it possible to use combinatorial chemistry in the manufacture of anilines. Such a development could speed up the screening of the compounds for a wide variety of industrial products, said Miller.

The College chemists have shown how chromium chloride can be used to energize a rare solid-to-solid catalytic reaction that makes it possible to produce a huge variety of anilines simultaneously. Chromium chloride shuttles back and forth between two solid substrates, converting raw materials to anilines.

"You can't just bang two solids up against each other and have them react," said Miller, whose research project was supported by Eastman Kodak Co. "You need a catalyst that can migrate from one material to the other." That catalyst, he discovered, is chromium chloride.

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