Influence of Confinements and Solvents on the Dehydration of Tertiary Alcohols

The dehydration of alcohols to olefins is an important reaction to many chemical transformations, including biomass conversion. Zeolites, which are crystalline aluminosilicates, provide confined environments where this reactivity may be enhanced by multiple orders of magnitude through a careful selection of solvents and confinement size. This effect can be enumerated through the measurement of activation enthalpies that enumerate the enthalpic barrier that a reactant (a tertiary alcohol) has to overcome, and activation entropy that enumerates disorder and the excess entropy that the reactant has to overcome at the transition state.

In this work, this information will be used for exploring the impact of solvent structure and properties that include solvent polarity and dielectric constants, and zeolite confinements, or pore size, on the dehydration kinetics of tertiary alcohols. A polar solvent, water and a nonpolar solvent, toluene will be used to explore the dehydration kinetics of 3-ethyl-3-pentanol and explore how changes in these properties will affect the reaction kinetics, including reaction rates, orders, activation enthalpies, and activation entropies.