Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

The proposed research is aimed towards understanding and developing solid-state reactivity as a means of achieving clean, environmentally-friendly chemical synthesis, developing new materials for sequestration of carbon dioxide, and introducing chemical reactions that are difficult or not possible in solution. The development of cleaner, safer and more efficient synthetic methodologies is one of the central challenges of modern chemistry. In that context, solvent-free mechanochemistry ( i.e. chemical transformations induced by mechanical grinding or milling) has revealed synthetic potential that can match, and even exceed that of conventional solution chemistry. While enabling cleaner, more energy-efficient reactivity, mechanochemistry also opens access to chemical reactions and products that have previously been thought difficult, or even impossible to achieve. Our group has been at the cutting edge of this development, especially in the synthesis of microporous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for gas storage, developing new routes to active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and introducing the first techniques for real-time mechanistic studies of mechanochemical reactions.

However, despite such rapid growth, mechanochemistry and related solid-state reaction techniques still remain poorly understood, with a lack of mechanistic understanding and reaction energetics limiting its further development.
We will address this challenge by building on our unique expertise in real-time, in situ reaction monitoring of mechanochemical reactions, to develop new techniques that will give us a detailed understanding of mechanochemistry in terms of changes in bulk reactant structure, as well as changes in molecular structure and environment. These new diffraction, spectroscopic and thermal techniques will be used along with computational modelling to advance the synthesis and understanding of MOFs, as well as to develop new organic transformations. The deliverables will be advances in mechanochemistry and solvent-free reactivity, development of MOFs designed not only for porosity, but also for stability, as well as new coupling reactions of amides and amino acids, important starting materials in pharmaceuticals and chemical industry. We will develop new directions in solvent-free chemistry, notably the coupling of mechano- and photochemistry, and enzyme catalysis under milling conditions. Offering the solid state as a completely new medium for enzyme activity could revolutionize biomass processing, and we will develop such solvent-free enzyme catalysis for the breakdown of recalcitrant biomass polymers chitin and lignin. The outcomes of proposed research will be major milestones in developing methods and materials for sustainable and clean chemistry, and will greatly contribute to the position of Canada as a leader in chemical innovation and manufacturing.