Furfural is an abundant species that can be produced from biomass degradation. It’s direct use is limited for many applications due to its ability to form polymeric humins at room temperature. A promising reaction to convert furfural to more stable high value chemicals involve the rearrangement of the furanic ring to form cyclic ketones, which are both more stable, have considerable markets for high value specialty chemicals, and can be used as building blocks for jet fuel. Ring rearrangement reactions are known to occur in acidic aqueous solutions combined with metal catalyst. Here we report that this chemistry can also occur in the vapor phase over unique active sites created at the perimeter of a metal particle and a reducible oxide support. This yields high selectivities to unsaturated cyclic ketones, which offer the potential to form dienes. Here we report the kinetics of this reaction over a variety of metals supported of varying metal-carbon binding energy over reducible oxides, and investigate the mechanism responsible for this interesting reaction.

Unique active sites at the metal/support interface for the production of high value products from furanics

256th National Meeting (2018)

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