A Tuneable Bifunctional Water-Compatible Heterogeneous Catalyst for the Selective Aqueous Hydrogenation of Phenols

✍ Scribed by Hongli Liu; Yingwei Li; Rafael Luque; Huanfeng Jiang

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 226 KB
• Volume: 353
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1615-4150
• DOI: 10.1002/adsc.201100479

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

A water‐tolerant bifunctional heterogeneous catalyst is able to effectively catalyse the selective hydrogenation of phenol to cyclohexanone in water at atmospheric pressure and room temperature with >99.9% selectivity to cyclohexanone at phenol conversions >99.9%. The catalyst was found to be highly active and reusable, giving identical activities and selectivities after >5 uses. Moreover, this reported simple bifunctional catalyst is also able to hydrogenate a range of substituted phenols in high yields under the investigated aqueous conditions.