Acetophenylethanol

In order to study the influence of reaction time, acetophenone with complex 2 (0.1 mol%) under standard conditions was monitored by GC-MS analysis taking 0.1 mL aliquots of the reaction mixture at intervals of 1 h. As can be observed in the conversion vs time plots, the formation of 1-phenylethanol was increased with the progress of the reaction, reached a maximum and then remained unchanged (Fig. 4). Reasonably good conversion (97.4%) for the formation of 1-phenylethanol was observed at the optimum reaction time of 5 h. There is no noticeable improvement was observed even after extending the reaction time. These result implies that the conversion of product strongly dependent of reaction time. With the promising results in hand, we next examine the catalytic efficiency of complex 2 for a wide range of aromatic, heterocyclic, cyclic and aliphatic ketones. To compare the results, all the reactions were carried out under identical conditions. The alcoholic products were analysed by GC-MS and 1H-NMR (entries 2, 15 and 16) after doing the required workup (Figs. S5-S20, see supplementary information). The complex catalysed TH of ketones to their corresponding alcohols with good to excellent conversions in all the cases. The existence of electron-withdrawing or electron-donating substituent on the aromatic ring shows significant effect in the rate of the reaction (Table 6, entries
The mechanism begins with elimination of chlorine from Ru complexes and form Ru-iso-propoxide species which is undergo β-hydride elimination leads to form ruthenium metal hydride species with the release of acetone. Insertion of ketone to Ru-H species, resulting formation of secondary alkoxide which is undergoes alcohol metathesis to give the alcoholic product and regenerate the original