Figure 7 . Recycling of PILs with styrene oxide (1a ) as substrate under 50 mol% loading at 30 ºC.
4. Conclusions
In summary, described herein develops a novel, green, and mild method mediated in tertiary amine-functionalized PILs to convert H2S into mercaptan alcohol. This series of PILs play a dual role of catalyst and solvent during the H2S conversion. Good or almost quantitative conversions were achieved for most of the substrates. Kinetic behavior shows that the conversion of epoxide can achieve almost quantitatively within 20 min under 10 mol% PILs catalyst loading at 30 °C. Water extraction was employed to separate PILs from the parent system, revealing a green, environmentally friendly, and energy-saving way in catalyst recycling. The developed catalytic systems could also be recycled and reused for seven runs without significant loss of catalytic activity. Generally, the advantages of the conversion of H2S in this work, such as wide applicability of substrates, solvent-free participation, water extraction separation, almost quantitative substrate conversion, fast reaction kinetics, reusability of catalysts, value-added products, and even gram scale amplification have potential industrial prospects in the resource utilization of H2S.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 22078145 and 21878141), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20190310), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2021M691515), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (020514380245). X. Zhang acknowledges the Yuxiu Young Scholars Program of Nanjing University for partial financial support.