Construction of covalent organic framework functionalized with carbene dual active sites for enhancing CO2 carboxylation conversion

It is challenging to drive the integral insertion of linear CO2 with thermodynamic stability and kinetic inertness as carboxylation reagents into C-H, O-H, and other chemical bonds. The known strategies mainly focus on unilaterally activating substrates as nucleophilic reagents, and the CO2 insertion process has to overcome high reaction energy barriers. Herein, this work reports copper carbene NHC-CuCl and CO2 adduct NHC-CO2 as dual active sites are introduced into the porous crystal covalent organic framework to effectively drive the simultaneous activation of substrate and CO2. The catalyst COF@NHC-CuCl/CO2 exhibited high space–time yield (STY = 71.9 h−1 at 40 °C and 36.7 h−1 at 25 °C, ambient pressure) in the carboxylative coupling of propargylic alcohols, which is superior to most of the cutting-edge heterogeneous catalysts. Experimental data and density functional theory calculation revealed that the carboxylation reaction involving NHC-CO2 and ordinary CO2 source follows different reaction mechanisms. The free energy barrier of the CO2 insertion process (TS:35.9 kcal/mol → 17.4 kcal/mol) is effectively reduced by NHC modulation of the CO2 bond energy parameters to facilitate the reaction. Due to the unique structural design, COF@NHC-CuCl/CO2 exhibited outstanding diffusion mass transfer, catalytic diversity and reusability. This work proposes a novel construction strategy of heterogeneous dual activation catalyst to provide a sustainable solution for efficiently producing value-added chemicals from CO2 under mild conditions.