N, N -dicyclohexylcarbodiimide functionalized Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles: an efficient heterogeneous organocatalyst for esterification reaction

Esters are one of the most important and plentiful functional groups in chemistry, and can be found in pharmaceuticals, natural products, polymers fine and bulk chemicals [1,2]. It is well known that the utilize of heterogeneous catalysts instead of homogeneous catalysts has many advantages in organic synthesis. In heterogeneous reaction, tedious methods like filtration and centrifugation are used to recover catalysts and end in loss of solid catalyst in the separation process [3]. Considering importance of esterification reaction in organic chemistry, in the present work we have developed new methodology for this reaction in the presence of N, N -dicyclohexylcarbodiimide (DCC) as a coupling reagent and DCC-functionalized Fe3O4 magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs-DCC) as an efficient heterogeneous organocatalyst (Scheme 1). This procedure has several benefits, such as short reaction time, mild reaction conditions, easy purification of the products and excellent yields. Additionally, supporting this organosuperbase catalyst on magnetic nanoparticles offers a simple method for easy reuse and recovery of the catalyst using an external magnetic field.