What is it about?

Ammonia borane was a popular molecule because it can store hydrogen gas chemically in a light weight package. Depending on how that hydrogen is removed, different products can form. To utilize the storage medium efficiently one of the common products is called polyborazylene. Several researchers have tried to transform this spent form back but it isn't always clear how well the material was characterized prior or during their reactions. In this paper we detail how polyborazylene behaves in liquid ammonia, a solvent used in one of the most prominent regeneration publications.

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Why is it important?

If the material you are working with is metastable, it can be insightful to characterize the species to which it forms prior to the introduction of other reagents. In this case polyborazylene actually breaks down into several species, one of which is ammonia-borane.

Perspectives

Dave Thorn and I actually discussed this idea back in 2006 when I first started working in this area. He had observed that polyborazylene breaks down and rearranges in pyridine. When it was pointed out that polyborazylene doesn't react in liquid ammonia (Science, 2011, 331, 1426-1429), we revisited our original observations and showed, in fact, it does.

Benjamin L Davis
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Lewis base assisted B–H bond redistribution in borazine and polyborazylene, Chemical Communications, January 2013, Royal Society of Chemistry,
DOI: 10.1039/c3cc44748k.
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