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Designing of a novel heterogeneous catalyst comprising 12-tungstophosphoric acid and zeolite HY for the synthesis of bio-based esters

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Abstract

The present work consists of development of a novel heterogeneous catalyst comprising Keggin type polyoxometalate, 12-tungstophosphoric acid (PW12), and zeolite HY and its evaluation for the synthesis of alkyl levulinate. Various physicochemical methods were used for characterization, and the reaction optimization was studied by applying the impacts of the main reaction parameters (i.e. catalyst loading, molar ratio of acid to alcohol, time, and temperature). The catalyst shows 88% conversion and 99% selectivity towards n-butyl levulinate under optimized conditions such as 90°, 8 h with molar ratio of acid to alcohol (1:2) following second-order kinetics with activation energy of 80 kJ/mol. The catalyst is recovered and reused three times, always showing good performances. The catalyst was also found to be versatile and sustainable for a number of different bio-platform molecules, and alcohols with different chain lengths give % selectivity of respective esters between 49 and 100%. A comparison with the reported ones having phosphotungstate-based heterogeneous catalysts as well as classical ion-exchange resins shows superiority of the present catalyst in terms of lower amount (0.025 g) as well as highest TOF of 425 h−1.

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Acknowledgements

AP and MJ are thankful to the Department of Chemistry, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda for the infrastructural facilities and DST-FIST for BET surface area analysis. MJ is thankful to SHODH (ScHeme Of Developing High quality research, KCG/SHODH/2020-21/) for providing financial support.

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  1. Polyoxometalates and Catalysis Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, 390020, Gujarat, India

    Anjali Patel, Margi Joshi & Shivani Sharma

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  1. Anjali Patel
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Anjali Patel, conceptualization, supervision, and writing — review and editing; Margi Joshi, formal analysis and investigation, methodology, and writing — original draft preparation; Shivani Sharma, preliminary experiments and analysis.

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Patel, A., Joshi, M. & Sharma, S. Designing of a novel heterogeneous catalyst comprising 12-tungstophosphoric acid and zeolite HY for the synthesis of bio-based esters. Biomass Conv. Bioref. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13399-022-03279-2

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