Porous, Naturally Derived Hafnium Phytate for the Highly Chemoselective Transfer Hydrogenation of Aldehydes with Other Reducible Moieties

Both the utilization of naturally occurring compounds to prepare functional materials and the selective conversion of aldehydes with other reducible moieties (ORMs) are very attractive topics. Herein, we synthesized a novel porous material, hafnium phytate (Hf-Phy), by using naturally derived sodium phytate as the building block. Hf-Phy has plenty of mesopores centered around 11.8 nm. Hf-Phy showed excellent performance for the transfer hydrogenation of aldehydes with ORMs by using 2-propanol as the hydrogen source with high selectivities (95–100 %) for alcohols without reducing ORMs. Systematic studies suggested that the oxophilicity of Hf4+ and the basicity and structure of Hf-Phy contributed significantly to the excellent performance. Additionally, Hf-Phy could be used over at least five cycles without any decrease in activity or selectivity.