Quats are very versatile and many different quat-anion pairs can be customized to meet specific needs for an application. In US Patent 7,578,971, PTC Organics helped its customer, Mercury Medical, develop a carbon dioxide detector (NOT carbon monoxide detector) used by emergency medical technicians to quickly determine in the field is a person is breathing. The quat salt customized for this purpose was methyltricaprylyl ammonium phenoxide.
The carbon dioxide detector is blue in air and turns yellow immediately when exposed to even small amounts of carbon dioxide from a person’s breath.
Ratner, J.; Green, D.; Crick, D.; Halpern, M.; (Mercury Enterprises) US Patent 7,578,971, 25-Aug-2009
If your company could benefit from a customized choice of a quat salt or other phase-transfer catalyst, contact Dr. Marc Halpern of PTC Organics to explore integrating the best available specialized expertise in industrial phase-transfer catalysis with your company’s process development needs to achieve the highest performance.
About Marc Halpern
Dr. Halpern is founder and president of PTC Organics, Inc., the only company dedicated exclusively to developing low-cost high-performance green chemistry processes for the manufacture of organic chemicals using Phase Transfer Catalysis. Dr. Halpern has innovated PTC breakthroughs for pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, petrochemicals, monomers, polymers, flavors & fragrances, dyes & pigments and solvents. Dr. Halpern has provided PTC services on-site at more than 260 industrial process R&D departments in 37 countries and has helped chemical companies save > $200 million. Dr. Halpern co-authored five books including the best-selling “Phase-Transfer Catalysis: Fundamentals, Applications and Industrial Perspectives” and has presented the 2-day course “Practical Phase-Transfer Catalysis” at 50 locations in the US, Europe and Asia.
Dr. Halpern founded the journal “Industrial Phase-Transfer Catalysis” and “The PTC Tip of the Month” enjoyed by 2,100 qualified subscribers, now beyond 130 issues. In 2014, Dr. Halpern is celebrating his 30th year in the chemical industry, including serving as a process chemist at Dow Chemical, a supervisor of process chemistry at ICI, Director of R&D at Sybron Chemicals and founder and president of PTC Organics Inc. (15 years) and PTC Communications Inc. (20 years). Dr. Halpern also co-founded PTC Interface Inc. in 1989 and PTC Value Recovery Inc. in 1999. His academic breakthroughs include the PTC pKa Guidelines, the q-value for quat accessibility and he has achieved industrial PTC breakthroughs for a dozen strong base reactions as well as esterifications, transesterifications, epoxidations and chloromethylations plus contributed to more than 100 other industrial PTC process development projects.
Dr. Halpern has dedicated his adult life to his family and to phase-transfer catalysis (in that order!).
