ORGANIC PREPARATIONS AND PROCEDURES INTERNATIONAL
021, VOL. 53, NO. 3, 284–290
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EXPERIMENTAL PAPER
Dendrimer-Functionalized Magnetic Graphene Oxide for
Knoevenagel Condensation
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Behrooz Maleki
, Fatemeh Taheri , Reza Tayebee
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Department of Chemistry, Hakim Sabzevari University, Sabzevar, Iran; School of Chemistry, Damghan
University, Damghan, Iran
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 14 June 2020; Accepted 30 September 2020
A great deal of attention has been paid to developing methods for heterogenizing
homogeneous catalysts in order to combine the advantages of both homogeneous and
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heterogeneous catalysis. Among these methods, the binding of catalysts to organic
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polymer solids or inorganic solids is widely used. Although the heterogenized catalysts
can be recycled and easily separated from the reaction mixtures, they are significantly
less reactive and selective than their homogeneous counterparts. For this reason, there
is a need to find new methods and strategies in order to overcome these limitations.
Graphene oxide (GO) and functionalized GOs are suitable for achieving this purpose.
GO has a large amount of functional groups on its basal plane, and these allow for the
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modification of GO for further applications.
The large surface area and functional
groups act as active sites. GO is a suspension in pure water but generally aggregates in
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salt solutions or in biological solutions. To overcome this problem and also to permit
easy separation by an external magnet, magnetic nanoparticles have been used.
Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) such as magnetite (Fe O ) are of much current interest
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because of their magnetic and electrical properties, high specific surface area, unique
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catalytic powers and wide applications.
Dendrimers are a comparatively new class of polymeric materials. They are highly
branched, monodisperse macromolecules. The structure of these materials has a great
impact on their physical and chemical properties. As a result of their unique character-
istics, including enormous surface areas in relation to volume, the presence of internal
cavities and the possibility of encapsulating guest molecules, dendrimers are suitable for
a wide range of biomedical and industrial uses. For example, polyamidoamine
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(PAMAM), has been beneficially applied.
We now describe a useful synthetic organic method based on combining the features
of magnetic nanoparticles, GO and dendrimers. The objective of this strategy is to hom-
ogenize a heterogeneous catalyst. Thus we sought to: (i) use magnetic nanoparticles to
minimize the support for the immobilization of the catalyst, while at the same time
keeping it easily separable; and (ii) use the dendrimerization process to produce organic
arms on the support. The latter action will enhance the compatibility of the material
with the medium, allow it to mimic real homogeneous catalysts and promote our
CONTACT Behrooz Maleki
Department of Chemistry, Hakim Sabzevari University,
Sabzevar, Iran
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