In London, one has the pleasures of attending occasional one day meetings at the Burlington House, home of the Royal Society of Chemistry. On November 5th this year, there was an excellent meeting on the topic of *Challenges in Catalysis, *and you can see the speakers and (some of) their slides here.
AbstractCalorimetric studies of the mixing of a series of carboxylic acids and amines have been carried out to measure heat output, which has been compared with their ability to react to form carboxylate ammonium salts and amides. In order to identify which species (salt or H‐bonded species) were formed, 1H NMR studies were also carried out by mixingcarboxylic acids and amines in [D8]toluene and monitoring the resulting reactions. These experiments were also compared to DFT computational studies, from which the relative merits of different mechanistic schemes for direct amide formation could be assessed. A reaction mechanism involving zwitterionic intermediates could be eliminated on the basis of calculated energies in toluene, however, a neutral intermediate pathway, involving carboxylic acid dimerization by mutual hydrogen bonding was found to be accessible and may explain how the direct amide formation reaction occurs. Such a mechanism is not inconsistent with kinetic modelling of direct amide formation under different reactions conditions.