One of the earliest PTC publications was called “Purple Benzene”. A crown ether was used to dissolve potassium permanganate in benzene. There are other publications that describe the use of the more affordable quats with permanganate to perform a variety of selective oxidations. This PTC Tip of the Month will discuss how we may be able to commercialize PTC-permanganate oxidations.
There are two reasons that permanganate is not used commercially as much as it should and these problems can be solved.
The two reasons are cost and environmental.
The byproduct of permanganate oxidation is manganese dioxide, a solid that cannot be thrown away easily. It usually must be landfilled or recycled.
In a meeting at Informex last week, I learned that Carus Chemical in Illinois will take back the manganese dioxide and convert it back to potassium permanganate if minimum quantities are met. This obviously affects the net cost of the permanganate and it also solves the problem of what to do with the large amount of the brown solid MnO2 that is generated. The alternative is disposal in a landfill, an obvious showstopping disadvantage.
If your company needs to perform a commercial scale oxidation for which selectivity can only be achieved using permanganate, you should consider outsourcing the oxidation to an organic chemical manufacturer that has relatively easy access to the Carus plant. Carus will perform the conversion of MnO2 back to KMnO4 if the quantity is at least 2 truckloads per year.
PTC Organics works with a strategic alliance partner in Indiana about 2 hours from the Carus plant.
Since the combination of [1] phase-transfer catalysis and permanganate provides unique selectivity performance for certain oxidations and [2] PTC Organics can develop and commercialize such oxidations in a manufacturing facility close enough to the Carus plant to enable perpetual recycle of the manganese, you should contact us to explore viable oxidations with permanganate.
This combination of PTC, permanganate and manganese recycle should help you expand the scope of commercial organic transformations that your company can now feasibly perform.
If you’re not sure if PTC can help your reaction, now fill out the form shown at http://phasetransfer.com/projectform.pdf and send it to Marc Halpern by fax at +1 856-222-1124 or by E-mail of a scanned copy. If we do not have a secrecy agreement already in place, please use “R-groups” instead of the exact chemical structures.
