Volume 202, 2017

Selective production of mono-aromatics from lignocellulose over Pd/C catalyst: the influence of acid co-catalysts

Abstract

The ‘lignin-first’ approach has recently gained attention as an alternative whole biomass pretreatment technology with improved yield and selectivity of aromatics compared with traditional upgrading processes using technical lignins. Metal triflates are effective co-catalysts that considerably speed up the removal of lignin fragments from the whole biomass. As their cost is too high in a scaled-up process, we explored here the use of HCl, H2SO4, H3PO4 and CH3COOH as alternative acid co-catalysts for the tandem reductive fractionation process. HCl and H2SO4 were found to show superior catalytic performance over H3PO4 and CH3COOH in model compound studies that simulate lignin–carbohydrate linkages (phenyl glycoside, glyceryl trioleate) and lignin intralinkages (guaiacylglycerol-β-guaiacyl ether). HCl is a promising alternative to the metal triflates as a co-catalyst in the reductive fraction of woody biomass. Al(OTf)3 and HCl, respectively, afforded 46 wt% and 44 wt% lignin monomers from oak wood sawdust in tandem catalytic systems with Pd/C at 180 °C in 2 h. The retention of cellulose in the solid residue was similar.

Associated articles

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
28 jan 2017
Accepted
20 feb 2017
First published
20 feb 2017
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Faraday Discuss., 2017,202, 141-156

Selective production of mono-aromatics from lignocellulose over Pd/C catalyst: the influence of acid co-catalysts

X. Huang, X. Ouyang, Bart M. S. Hendriks, O. M. M. Gonzalez, J. Zhu, T. I. Korányi, M. D. Boot and E. J. M. Hensen, Faraday Discuss., 2017, 202, 141 DOI: 10.1039/C7FD00039A

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements