Various types of sulfides are chemoselectively oxidized to the corresponding sulfoxides by treatment of Al(NO 3 ) 3 .9H 2 O, silica sulfuric acid and a catalytic amount of NaBr in the presence of wet SiO 2 (50% w/w) in CH 2 Cl 2 at room temperature. The catalytic oxidation procedure is very simple and the products are easily isolated in good yields.Keywords: Sulfides; Sulfoxides; Homoselectivity; Aluminium nitrate; Silica sulfuric acid.The design and development of heterogeneous catalysts are one of the most important objectives in the current area of research interest. The Important aspect of clean technology is the use of environmentally friendly catalysts.1 Recently, the development of efficient and new catalytic systems for various organic transformations is an active ongoing research area and the scope for further improvement towards milder reaction conditions.
2The chemistry of sulfoxides has been attractive to organic chemists. Because sulfoxides are valuable synthetic intermediates for the construction of chemically and biologically important significant molecules.3-5 Sulfoxides have also been used extensively in organic synthesis such as C-C bond-forming, molecular rearrangements and functional group transformations. 6-10 Although various oxidizing agents are used for this purpose, 11-32 unfortunately, some of these reagents are not satisfactory for the selective oxidation of sulfides to the sulfoxides because of several reasons. The first reason is that sulfoxides can undergo overoxidation to sulfones and therefore it is important that the catalyst has low reactivity towards the sulfoxides. Other serious obstacles of the previous procedures are long reaction time, low selectivity, low yields of products, toxicity, and expensive reagents. In continuation of our recent studies on the oxidation reactions, [33][34][35][36][37][38][39] we have been enthusiastic to introduce a new catalytic media, based on in situ generation of X + using aluminium nitrate {Al(NO 3 ) 3 .9H 2 O}, silica sulfuric acid {SiO 2 -OSO 3 H} and a metal halide. Silica sulfuric acid can be easily prepared by the reaction of chlorosulfonic acid with silica gel (Scheme I).
40To find the best reaction conditions for the oxidation of sulfides, a combination of Al(NO 3 ) 3 .9H 2 O, silica sulfuric acid and catalytic amounts of a metal halide (MX) in the presence of wet SiO 2 (50% w/w) in dichloromethane at room temperature was examined for the oxidation of benzyl phenyl sulfide as a model reaction, and the results are summarized in Table 1. As can be seen from Table 1, the best result is referred to Al(NO 3 ) 3 .9H 2 O, silica sulfuric acid and wet SiO 2 (50% w/w) in the presence of catalytic amount of NaBr.Consequently, we presented a new heterogeneous catalytic protocol for the selective oxidation of different types of sulfides 1 to the corresponding sulfoxides 2 using combination of Al(NO 3 ) 3 .9H 2 O I, silica sulfuric acid II and wet SiO 2 (50% w/w) in the presence of catalytic amounts of NaBr IV in dichloromethane at room temperature ...