Eco-friendly synthesis of pyrano[2,3-d]pyrimidinone derivatives catalyzed by a novel nanocatalyst of ZnO-supported copper oxide in water Jalal Albadi • Azam Mansournezhad • Tayebeh Sadeghi Received: 15 October 2014 / Accepted: 9 December 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract Eco-friendly synthesis of pyrano[2,3-d]pyrimidinone derivatives cata- lyzed by a novel nanocatalyst of ZnO-supported copper oxide in water is reported. The catalyst is synthesized by a co-precipitation method and characterized by BET surface area, XRD, SEM, EDS, and TEM analysis. CuO/ZnO nanocatalyst can promote the yields and reaction times over five runs without significant loss in its efficiency. Keywords Pyrano[2,3-d]pyrimidinones Á CuO/ZnO nanocatalyst Á Barbituric acid Á Malononitrile Á Aldehyde Introduction The conventional multistep synthesis of a complex molecule involves a large number of synthetic operations, including extraction and purification processes in each individual step. This leads to not only synthetic inefficiency but also generates large amounts of waste. Multi-component reactions (MCRs), defined as one-pot reactions in which at least three different substrates link through covalent bonds, Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11164-014-1894-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. J. Albadi (&) Behbahan Khatam Alanbia University of Technology, Behbahan, Iran e-mail: chemalbadi@gmail.com; albadi@bkatu.ac.ir A. Mansournezhad Department of Chemistry, Gachsaran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Gachsaran, Iran T. Sadeghi Department of Chemistry, Shiraz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shiraz, Iran 123 Res Chem Intermed DOI 10.1007/s11164-014-1894-0