From agriculture residue to catalyst support; A green and sustainable cellulose-based dip catalyst for CC coupling and direct arylation.

The core characteristics of a perfect catalyst include good activity, simple design, excellent stability, easy recovery from reaction mixture, recyclability, and have the provision for easy scale up. The ease in synthesis, recyclability and scale up makes the dip catalyst a major contender in this regard which possess most of the aforementioned characteristics. In this work, we report a dip catalyst made of cellulose, isolated from agriculture residue (sugarcane bagasse), in which biogenically synthesized palladium nanoparticles were dispersed. The prepared dip catalyst was characterized by FESEM, EDS, XRD, ATR-IR, TGA, TEM, XPS and ICP-OES analysis. Also, the activity of the dip catalyst was studied in the Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reaction and was found to give excellent conversion with 15 recycles. Further, the activity of dip catalyst in C5-arylation of 2-substituted thiophenes was evaluated for which promising yields were obtained.