“On-Water” enhanced base-catalytic oxidation of α-hydroxy ketone to diketone

The selective oxidation of alcohols to corresponding carbonyl compounds is essential in academia and industry. Benzil and BHMF have emerged as important classes of carbonyl compounds that have shown promising applications in materials and drug intermediates, especially in sustainable bio-based plastics. The traditional selective oxidation process generally uses equivalent amounts of oxidants or toxic reagents and generates a large amount of waste. Hence, it is very urgent to develop a greener, sustainable, practical, and industrially applicable selective oxidation process due to the environmental and sustainable requirements. Here, for the first time, we developed a water assistant base catalyzed selective oxidation of α-hydroxy ketone to the corresponding carbonyl compounds using air under mild reaction conditions. To the best of our knowledge, the only base K2CO3 catalytic selective oxidation of DHMF to BHMF under water using air as an oxidant has not been reported so far. Compared with the traditional selective oxidation, in this work, catalytic amounts of base, sustainable and green solvent water, and oxidant air were used for the first time.