Abstract
Production of energy and chemicals from biomass resources has been regarded as one promising method to address the challenge of global warming. In this research, production of acrylic acid from fumaric acid, one of the biomass-derived building blocks, is proposed. CuO was employed as a solid oxidant, which showed excellent activity and selectivity for the production of acrylic acid, and water played an essential role in acting as not only a solvent but also a catalyst in this process. An optimum acrylic acid yield of 76.4% was successfully obtained after the reaction of fumaric acid with CuO at 300 °C for only 60 s.This research provides a green and highly efficient way to produce value-added chemicals from biomass-derived building blocks, and thus is promising for practical application.
Highlights
To produce energy and chemicals from sustainable biomass is of vital importance for avoiding CO2 emissions and global warming [1]
To examine whether copper oxides can be effective in the oxidation of thefumaric acid into acrylic acid, experiments of fumaric acid reacting in the presence and absence of copper oxides (CuO and Cu2 O) were conducted at 300 ◦ C for 60 s
Cu2 O and CuO, respectively (Supplementary Figure S1).These results suggest that copper oxides had a clear promotion effect on the production of acrylic acid from fumaric acid, and the effect of CuO was better compared with Cu2 O
Summary
To produce energy and chemicals from sustainable biomass is of vital importance for avoiding CO2 emissions and global warming [1]. Different processes as well as biomass-derived feedstocks were employed to improve efficiency in acrylic acid production research [9,10,11,12,13]. Previous research has successfully demonstrated that lactic acid could be oxidized to acrylic acid under hydrothermal conditions [10]. Many works have demonstrated that lignin models could be oxidized into fumaric acid under hydrothermal conditions [26,27,28,29,30]. Our previous studies showed that lignin model compounds can be oxidized to fumaric more than maleic acid under hydrothermal conditions [28]. The potential of fumaric acid as a feedstock for the production of acrylic acid under hydrothermal conditions is studied. CuO is employed as an oxidant due to it being more affordable than synthetic H2 O2 and more convenient than gaseous O2
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