Chemo- and Enantioselective Hydrogenations : The Struggle of Expanding the Substrate Scope of Iridium Catalyzed Asymmetric Hydrogenations of Olefins

Abstract: The asymmetric hydrogenation of olefins is a facile and popular method of reaching chiral products. Whereas ruthenium- and rhodium-catalyzed asymmetric hydrogenations have a long history, the use of iridium in this area is new but fast-growing. Since the first chiral N,P-ligated iridium catalyst was created in the late 1990s, the growing pool of N,P ligands has filled up rapidly, but most have been tested with a limited range of standard olefins. To extract the full potential of these complexes, new methods using substrates having many possible applications must be developed. This thesis focuses on the iridium-catalyzed asymmetric hydrogenation of three different new substrate classes to yield very high conversions and enantiomeric excesses (ee's). As the use of fluorine has recently become common in many different fields of chemistry, the asymmetric reduction of fluoroolefins to reach chiral products having fluorine at the stereogenic centers is highly interesting. We studied this reaction and eventually obtained very high ee values and lower degree of defluorination (Paper I and Paper II). The hydrogenations of trifluoromethylated olefins to reach products useful in applications reaching from pharmaceuticals to additives in liquid crystal displays (LCDs) were also challenging, but fruitful (Paper III). As asymmetric hydrogenation usually demands differences in the substituents of the double bond, the highly selective reduction of 1,1-diaryl olefins having similar aryls give a new perspective on the broad scope of substrates that N,P-ligated iridium complexes can reduce selectively (paper IV).