Catalytic dehydrative cross-coupling of alcohols: An eco-friendly approach to unsymmetrical ethers

Developing green as well as sustainable protocols by employing cheap and readily available catalysts and/or reagents without using environmentally hazardous solvents is becoming more significant to the researcher community. Here, we introduce a green and metal-free catalytic method for the etherification of alcohols by using catalytic NH4I and oxone under mild conditions. The reagents we employed are inexpensive, abundant in nature, readily available, easy to handle and produce non-polluting by-products, which can be easily removable by simple aqueous work-up. This makes our approach more convenient, sustainable and economically viable. The present catalytic system does not require any organic solvent as reaction medium to facilitate the reaction. Using this green approach, we have synthesized a wide range of unsymmetrical ethers from two distinct types of alcohols (secondary benzylic and primary (benzylic or non-benzylic) alcohols) which demonstrated the efficiency of our protocol. Further, the gram scale reactions established the feasibility in scaling-up of our process. [Display omitted] •Developed an efficient, green and metal free catalytic method.•Potentiality of this method is ensured with various substrates in good yields.•This approach benefits industrial applications by gram scale experiments.•The method doesn't require any additional solvent to proceed the reaction.