Electrochemical epoxidation of alkene with high faradaic efficiencies using water as an oxygen source

Epoxides are important synthetic intermediates due to their high propensity to undergo ring-opening to give a variety of products with useful functional groups. In this study, we disclose a non-halide-mediated electrochemical epoxidation of alkenes to form epoxides using water as an oxygen source. This method catalyzed by (TMP)MnCl (TMP = tetramesitylporphyrin) exhibits remarkable efficiency, enabling the epoxidation of both aromatic and aliphatic alkenes with excellent faradaic efficiencies (up to 89%). Preliminary mechanistic studies suggest the MnV 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 11111111 00000000 11111111 00000000 00000000 00000000 O species generated from single electron oxidations serves as the key intermediate for the epoxidation reaction. An efficient electrochemical epoxidation of alkenes catalyzed by (TMP)MnCl with water as the oxygen source is disclosed. The reaction achieved impressive faradaic efficiencies (up to 89%) for a broad range of substrates.