Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Homogeneous Catalysis: Mechanisms and Industrial Applications by Sumit Bhadari and Doble Mukesh Wiley-Interscience: New York, 2000. 239 pp. ISBN 0-471-37221-8. $79.95. reviewed by Richard M. Pagni
There is always debate about the content of the chemistry curriculum, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Are the courses too theoretical and do they contain too little descriptive chemistry, for example? This is a particularly contentious issue in general chemistry. Are courses too abstract and academic and not sufficiently practical and industrial? It is generally agreed that chemistry majors learn very little industrial chemistry, the area in which most of them will find employment. The best opportunity at present for students to pick up this information is in specialty courses. The book under consideration, Homogeneous Catalysis: Mechanisms and Industrial Application, attempts to fill such a niche. In spite of the somewhat ambiguous title, this is a book about the application of solution-phase organotransition metal chemistry to industrial syntheses. Although heterogenous catalysis dominates industrial chemistry, homogeneous catalysis still plays a significant role. This is the authors’ justification for writing this book. There are nine chapters in the book. The first, not surprisingly, deals with industry and homogeneous catalysis. Here one learns about the feed stocks used in industry and the types of compounds it produces. This is followed by a chapter on basic organometallic chemistry, an essential topic in the book but presented so tersely that it isn’t of much help in the chapters that follow. This issue will be discussed again later. An interesting and informative chapter on relevant chemical engineering principles follows. Chemical engineers put into practice what the industrial chemists developed. As chemistry majors rarely take chemical engineering courses, the inclusion of this material is timely. The subsequent chapters deal with the expected topics: carbonylation, where the carbonylation of methanol and methyl acetate among several reactions is discussed; hydroformylation; polymerization; other alkene-based reactions where hydrogenation, oligomerization, metathesis, hydrocyanation, hydrosilation, and the Heck reaction are described; oxidations including epoxidation, autoxidation, and the Wacker reaction; and the increasingly important asymmetric catalysis. All the above processes are
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used in the service of making organic compounds and polymers. Much of the chemistry in the book is presented in terms of the catalytic cycle, where catalysts or precatalysts and substrates go into the cycle and products and catalysts come out. Many of the steps in each cycle involve oxidative addition and reduction elimination. Up-to-date information is provided on what is experimentally known about each cycle. I found it surprising that what is known is often limited, even for industrially important reactions. The missing information is filled in with the behavior of model reactions, molecular orbital calculations, precedence, and intuition. Much experimental work still needs to be done to elucidate the mechanisms for many of these reactions. The format of each chapter is standard, consisting of narrative, where the reactions and catalytic cycles are described, followed by an extensive set of questions and answers and an up-to-date bibliography of relevant books, articles, and reviews. The purpose of the questions and answers is not clear because an answer follows each question. I believe that it is better to isolate the answers from the questions. It’s all too easy to look at the answer before solving the problem. On the other hand, some answers are literature citations. What does all of this mean? Perhaps the authors use the thought-provoking questions and answers as a vehicle to expand the textual material in an innovative manner. The writing style is one that students will like. It is clear, informal, and yet terse. There are very few typographical errors. The notable exception is where a sentence is truncated in its middle. It is impossible to tell how many additional lines of text were omitted as well. The drawings follow the writing style. They are by and large clear but no great pains were taken to show stereochemistry clearly. Unfortunately, this lack of care in eliciting stereochemistry leads to some atrocious drawings, often in cases where stereochemical considerations are paramount. I think it fair to say that this book is about applications of homogeneous catalysis, not about learning the fundamentals of homogeneous catalysis or how to develop new methodology. Thus, this book could be used in conjunction with a course on organotransition metal chemistry. It could also be used as the primary text for a course in catalysis provided the students are already conversant with the fundamentals of organometallic chemistry. Richard M. Pagni is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1600;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 78 No. 7 July 2001 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
