Efficient Synthesis of Furfural from Biomass Using SnCl₄ as Catalyst in Ionic Liquid.

Yifan Nie,Weizun Li,Qidong Hou,Meiting Ju,Chuanyunlong Bai,Xinyu Bai

doi:10.3390/molecules24030594

Abstract

Furfural is a versatile platform molecule for the synthesis of various chemicals and fuels, and it can be produced by acid-catalyzed dehydration of xylose derived from renewable biomass resources. A series of metal salts and ionic liquids were investigated to obtain the best combination of catalyst and solvent for the conversion of xylose into furfural. A furfural yield of 71.1% was obtained at high xylose loading (20 wt%) from the single-phasic reaction system whereby SnCl4 was used as catalyst and ionic liquid 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium bromide (EMIMBr) was used as reaction medium. Moreover, the combined catalyst consisting of 5 mol% SnCl4 and 5 mol% MgCl2 also produced a high furfural yield (68.8%), which was comparable to the furfural yield obtained with 10 mol% SnCl4. The water–organic solvent biphasic systems could improve the furfural yield compared with the single aqueous phase. Although these organic solvents could form biphasic systems with ionic liquid EMIMBr, the furfural yield decreased remarkably compared with the single EMIMBr phase. Besides, the EMIMBr/SnCl4 system with appropriate water was also efficient to convert xylan and lignocellulosic biomass corn stalk into furfural, obtaining furfural yields as high as 57.3% and 54.5%, respectively.

Highlights

With the depletion of fossil energy and the deterioration of ecological environments, modern society needs to develop economical, energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly processes to achieve sustainable production of fuels and chemicals [1]
As for AlCl3, FeCl2, and MgCl2, the furfural yields were less than 5%
This study investigated the catalytic performance of metal chlorides in different solvents for xylose dehydration into furfural

Summary

Introduction

With the depletion of fossil energy and the deterioration of ecological environments, modern society needs to develop economical, energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly processes to achieve sustainable production of fuels and chemicals [1]. Considerable attention has been paid to utilizing renewable biomass resources to produce value-added chemicals to relieve the resource and energy crisis [2,3,4]. Both chemical catalysis and biotechnology have been proposed to depolymerize cellulose and hemicellulose into C5 –C6 sugar monomers, such as glucose, xylose, and arabinose [5,6,7]. Furfural by chemical catalysis routes, respectively [8,9]. The large-scale production and commercial application of furfural have already been achieved

Methods

Results

Conclusion