Teflon Non-stick Cookware's New "Eco-Friendly" Avatar

Teflon, which is the brand name for DuPont’s non-stick cookware, may soon become much more eco-friendly than before. After numerous pioneering studies, scientists have discovered a catalyst that is capable of breaking the C-F bond in the cookware and converting it into a more eco-friendly carbon-hydrogen bond.

Though the strength of the C-F bond makes it useful in so many applications apart from Teflon cookware, it also gives a formidable greenhouse gas effects that persists in nature.

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"The C-F bond is difficult to transform into other bonds under mild conditions because it is inert and unreactive; it's a challenge to chemists," said lead author chemist Oleg Ozerov, who conducted the research with postdoc Christos Douvris.

"But, we found a way to take a C-F bond that you can do very little with and break it and convert it cleanly into something else at room temperature," he added.

With research support from the Department of Energy, Sloan Foundation, and Research Corporation, Ozerov identified a new catalytic process for a class of carborane-silylium compounds that causes the bonds in representative HFCs to react at room temperature, swapping their carbon-fluorine bonds for carbon-hydrogen bonds.

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The silylium catalyst performs the critical task of breaking the C-F bond by abstracting the fluoride from the fluorocarbon and attaching it to a silicon atom.

The end product is a compound with a silicon-fluorine bond, which is no longer a greenhouse threat.

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This finding could eventually lead to large-scale reactions to convert environmental pollutants that contain C-F bonds into products that could be reused or destroyed without special equipment.

"Conversion of PFCs remains a challenge, and our research efforts are directed at designing even more active catalysts, capable of PFC activation," said Ozerov.

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Source-ANI
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