Abstract: Catalytic oxidation in the liquid phase finds widespread application in the chemical industry for the manufacture of a wide variety of chemicals ranging from commodities to fine chemical specialties. Heterogeneous catalysts have the clear advantage, compared to their homogeneous counterparts, of facile recovering and recycling and thus meet the requirements of sustainable chemistry, which has become one of the greatest challenges of our time [1]. Furthermore, confinement of catalytically active species in porous matrices may potentially endow them with unique selectivities as well as preclude their deactivation. In the last decades, the area of heterogeneous catalysis related to liquid phase selective oxidations has experienced an impressive progress [2]. The revolution in this field occurred at the beginning of the 1980s when Enichem researchers developed Titanium Silicalite-1 (TS-1), the catalyst which is now employed in three H2O2-based industrial processes. Since that time, other families of solid catalysts, namely framework-substituted mesoporous molecular sieves, supported transition metal complexes and noble metal nanoparticles, as well as a novel class of functional materials, metal-organic frameworks, have received significant attention. This lecture has the aim to give a brief overview of the main achievements and challenges in the field of heterogeneous liquid phase selective oxidation. A selection of the most relevant results reported thus far in the literature is provided, with particular attention paid to the critical issues of the operational stability and reusability of the catalysts. Protocols for establishing the nature of catalysis (truly heterogeneous versus homogeneous caused by active species leached into solution) are addressed. Different approaches elaborated in recent years to create leaching-tolerant solid catalysts are compared, and the scope and limitations of the existing catalyst systems are discussed

Cite: Kholdeeva O.A.
Liquid Phase Selective Oxidation via Heterogeneous Catalysis
Catalyst Design: 4th International School-Conference on Catalysis for Young Scientists 05-06 Sep 2015