(582x) Selective Glucose Isomerization to Fructose Using Heterogeneous Amine Catalysts

Upgrading biomass is an important step toward a more sustainable chemical industry. Selective glucose isomerization to fructose is a bottleneck in upgrading cellulosic biomass to high valued products like high fructose corn syrup and useful intermediates like 5-hydroxymethylfurfural. The Lewis acidic heterogeneous catalyst, Sn-beta has been extensively researched for this reaction in the past few years.¹ With recent reports demonstrating the ability of homogeneous amines to selectively convert glucose to fructose, there is a growing interest in developing means to translate these properties of homogeneous amines to heterogeneous materials.² Herein, we report heterogeneous amine catalysts developed using organosilanes immobilized onto porous supports for selective conversion of glucose to fructose. We investigated catalyst design parameters including the organosilane structure and loading, finding that tuning both these parameters results in the best catalytic performance.

References:

(1) Moliner, M.; Román-Leshkov, Y.; Davis, M. E. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2010, 107 (14), 6164–6168.

(2) Liu, C.; Carraher, J. M.; Swedberg, J. L.; Herndon, C. R.; Fleitman, C. N.; Tessonnier, J. P. ACS Catal. 2014, 4 (12), 4295–4298.