Background: The eco-friendly power of hydrogen peroxide oxidant produced water that was the only by-product after oxidation. Unfortunately, its oxidation power towards chalcones and chalcones analogs was substantially low, and therefore, it was normally used together with a catalyst or converted to hydroperoxides in order to improve its oxidation power.
Objective: This research aimed to study epoxidation chemistry. Hence, hydrogen peroxide was used as a potential oxidant for epoxidation with different techniques and catalysts.
Methodology: Advantageous effects of (reline) (derived from two moles of choline chloride and one mole of urea) as a deep eutectic solvent (DES) or the gold (Au) catalyst nanoparticles (NPs) supported on titanium oxide (Au–TiO2) on the chalcone derivatives of peroxidation was studied under several procedure conditions using hydrogen peroxide/sodium bicarbonate to produce novel oxiranes (I-VI).
Results and Discussion: Acceptable results were obtained by method (B) using hydrogen peroxide/sodium bicarbonate – (reline) mixture, which gave 87- 90% peroxidation results in a short time (4 h) in comparison with less than 86% and 24 h of the conventional method (A), while using the Au NPs supported on titanium oxide (Au–TiO2); that is, Method (C) gave the best percentage yield of 90-95 % and time (about 2 h), which is about half of that of (Reline) mixture. Such a condition may be due to high activation of hydrogen peroxide by Au and titanium oxide nanoparticles and low viscosity of the reaction mixture.
Conclusions: The chalcones epoxidations would convince chemists that using the deep eutectic solvent (Reline) and the Au-supported on titanium oxide NPs for catalysing these reactions are techniques of great importance in various branches of oxidation.