Synthesis of quinolines via acceptorless dehydrogenative tandem cyclization of 2-amionbenzyl alcohol with alcohols using magnetic CuNiFeO nanocatalyst

[Display omitted] •In this work, we report magnetically separable CuNiFeO nanocatalyst for synthesis of quinolines.•The synthesized CuNiFeO nanocatalyst were characterized using techniques such as FEG-SEM, XRD, TEM, EDS, and FTIR.•Further, the CuNiFeO a magnetic nanocatalyst could be reused consecutively up to five times without any significant loss of catalytic activity. This work reports the preparation of nano CuNiFeO and its application in the synthesis of quinolines. The prepared nanocatalyst was characterized using various characterization techniques such as XRD, FEG-SEM, EDX, HR-TEM and XPS. Nano CuNiFeO as a heterogeneous catalyst shows a very high efficiency towards double dehydrogenation tandem cyclization reaction of 2-amionbenzyl alcohol with alcohols resulting into a simple, sustainable and environment friendly synthesis of quinolines. Due to the magnetic property associated with nanocatalyst, it was easily separated from the reaction mixture using external magnet and could be reused up to five cycles. To the best of our knowledge, this is for the first time a heterogenous magnetic CuNiFeO nanocatalyst is being reported for this reaction.