Zeolite-encaged gold catalysts for the oxidative condensation of furfural

Abstract

The oxidative condensation between renewable furfural and fatty alcohols is a crucial avenue for producing high-quality liquid fuels and valuable furan derivatives. The selectivity control in this reaction process remains a significant challenge. Herein, we report the strategy of confining well dispersed gold species within ZSM-5 structure to construct highly active Au@ZSM-5 zeolite catalysts for the oxidative condensation of furfural. Characterization results and spectroscopy analyses demonstrate the efficient encapsulation of isolated and cationic Au clusters in zeolite structure. Au@ZSM-5(K) catalyst shows remarkable performance with 69.7% furfural conversion and 90.2% furan-2-acrolein selectivity as well as good recycle stability. It is revealed that the microstructure of ZSM-5 zeolite can significantly promote oxidative condensation activity through confinement effects. This work presents an explicit example of constructing zeolite encaged noble metal catalysts toward targeted chemical transformations.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

zeolite / encapsulation / gold / oxidative condensation / furfural

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Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Fund of China (Grant Nos. 22025203 and 22121005).

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