(532s) Biomass Produces Glycolic Acid

The shortage of fossil resources and increasingly severe environmental problems make the energy structure change gradually, and the utilization of renewable resources becomes particularly important. Glycolic acid is an important industrial raw material. At present, the main production method of glycolic acid is hydrolysis of chloroacetic acid. This method has low utilization rate of raw materials, serious energy consumption and environmental pollution. Therefore, in the long run, the production of glycolic acid with renewable biomass as raw material has development potential and high economic benefits, and can be used as a route to replace the traditional production of glycolic acid.

In this paper, glycolic acid was synthesized from biomass, that is, cellulose was hydrogenated to ethylene glycol and oxidized to glycolic acid. A series of novel hexagonal mesoporous silica (HMS) carriers were synthesized by in situ method, and then Pt-HMS were prepared by impregnation method. The catalysts were characterized by XRD, BET, NH₃-TPD, FTIR and H_­2-TPD and so on. The catalytic performance of the catalyst was evaluated in the hydrogenation of cellulose microcrystalline to ethylene glycol. The results show that the Si/W in the catalyst has a great influence on the selectivity of the reaction products. The catalytic activity increases with the increase of Si/W in the catalyst, and decreases with the increase of Si/W in the catalyst when the Si/W is 75. The Si/W=75 catalyst has the best catalytic activity, reaction temperature 230℃, pressure 4MPa, reaction time 6h, ethylene glycol yield of 57.3%. The selectivity of glycolic acid exceeds 90% at 70℃.

The implementation of the results of this project is of great significance to the development of green synthesis route, significantly reduce energy consumption and pollution in the generation process, and promote the sustainable development of bio-based high-end materials.