Vjekoslav Štrukil Receives the CrystEngComm Award
Vjekoslav Štrukil, BSc, Research Assistant in the RBI Laboratory of Physical-Organic Chemistry, received the CrystEngComm Award for the poster titled A Mechanochemical Approach Towards Solvent-Free Synthesis at the recent Symposium on Mechanochemistry and Solvent-Free Synthesis, held on 6-7 November at Queen's University Belfast in Belfast (UK). The study presented on the awarded poster was created in cooperation with Dr. Tomislav Friščić from the Materials Chemistry Group at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge.
The paper describes the application of the ball mill in mechanochemical synthesis of coordination compounds of zinc and cadmium with cyanoguanidine as organic ligand. The specificity of this method is the possibility of chemical synthesis by the use of minimal amounts of solvents (several microlitars, so called Liquid-assisted grinding) or even without any solvent.
Applications of mechanochemical reactions and investigation of the details of these processes are attractive directions in modern chemistry, because they may give rise to development of efficient, selective and simple synthetic methods for preparation of various compounds. Such environmentally friendly solventless methods also constitute one of the basis of the new applied chemistry field of 'green chemistry'.
