Hydrocarbons are the main constituents of fossil fuels and catalysis is certainly the most important tool for the selective conversion of these feedstocks into vital commercial chemicals. Homogeneous catalytic oxidation forms the basis for a variety of these processes. Especially liquid-phase processes are usually highly selective and offer a number of important advantages as these processes employ mild conditions and hence are particularly suitable for application of fragile homogeneous transition metal complex catalysts. This effort describes the application of a novel homogeneous catalyst comprising of cobalt in its varying oxidation states for a route from hydrocarbons to hydroperoxides, important constituents for the industries based on polymerization and oxidation processes. A rare irreversible consecutive reaction network has been found to reasonably describe the observed kinetics and a novel chemometrics technique, inverse non-linear principal component regression, has been...
