Technical Study For Conversion Of Xylose Solution Into Furfural Over The Solid Acid

Rapidly growing worldwide energy demand has triggered a renewed interest inproducing fuels from biomass to add to worldwide energy supplies. Because of theimportant applications in organic chemical industry, the synthesis of plastics,pharmaceutical, pesticides and so on, furfural and its production process have beena hot spot of research in the field of Biomass energy. Furfural, as one of the mostpromising green platform chemical compound, there is no synthetic route availablefor furfural production; therefore furfural is exclusively produced from renewablebiomass resources by acid-catalyzed dehydration of pentoses. Conventional mineralacids are generally used as catalysts for the conversion of D-xylose to furfural.However, these mineral acids often lead to serious corrosion, safety problems, anddifficulty in catalyst separation from the reaction products, excessive wastedisposal, extensive side reactions, and loss of furfural yield due to long residencetimes. So the improvement of the chemical technology for the production offurfural therefore remains of great interest for the growth of furan-based chemicalindustries. Solid acids find a wide range of catalytic applications in oil andchemical conversion processes. Solid acid catalysis has attracted much interest bothin fundamental and applied research because of its potential to generate significanteconomic and environmental benefits. Solid acids are widely used catalysts topromote the cracking of hydrocarbons. Therefore, it is hoped that solid acids can beused as catalysts to reduce the viscosity of heavy oil via mild cracking at the lowertemperatures.In this paper, we designed four kinds of solid acids and choosed the sulfonicacid-functionalized ordered zirconia oxide as the catalyst. D-xylose is catalyticallyconverted to furfural, respectively by zirconia promoted by sulfate groups. Wefound that the sulfonic acid-functionalized ordered zirconia oxide is an effectivecatalyst for the dehydration of D-xylose to furfural, using the dimethylsulfoxide(DMSO) as the solvent.The optimal catalytic reaction conditions were determined by single factordesign. The results showed that the optimal catalytic reaction conditions were thefollowing conditions:30mL of DMSO and2.0g xylose,2.5gSO24/ZrO2andheating for4h. It resulted in the maximum yield of47.7%. Although the furfuralyield is low, the solid acids catalyst has a lot of advantages and can be usedrepeatedly, so the solid acid catalyst has a wide application prospect.