Hydrocarbon oxidations catalyzed by azide-activated metal coordination complexes

摘要

Hydrocarbons, and particularly lower molecular weight alkanes and cycloalkanes, may readily be oxidized with air or O2 to form such products as alcohols, ketones, and the like selectively on high yields when there is employed as the catalyst a highly active azide-activated metal coordination complex having the structure <IMAGE> where M is a transition metal; " " is a ligand; and X is azide. The invention is also directed to certain novel azide-activated metal coordination complex catalysts per se.