Selective Oxidation of Benzyl Alcohol Over Sulphated Zirconia Incorporated Ordered Mesoporous Carbon by a Hard Template Method

An ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) support was prepared by a hard template method using cellulose (C source) and SBA-16 (silica source) as templates. The silica-carbon composite was treated with 10% HF to completely remove silica from the composite to create a mesoporous nature. Afterwards, Zr (10-30 wt. %) and 4% of SO42- were incorporated over OMC by a hydrolysis method. The prepared catalysts were characterized by various techniques such as XRD, Raman, BET, Py-FT-IR, TGA, SEM, Elemental mapping, and TEM. The detailed investigation of selective oxidation of benzyl alcohol (BzOH) to benzaldehyde (BzH) was performed using OMC, SO42-/Zr-OMC (10), SO42-/Zrs-OMC (20), and SO42-/Zr-OMC (30) catalysts at all the conditions. A detailed study of the effect of catalysts, reaction time, BzOH/TBHP ratios were examined and discussed in more results. This study exhibited the SO42-/Zr-OMC (30) catalyst showed its superior activity in the oxidation of benzyl alcohol (about > 97% of the conversion and BzH selectivity of > 98%) under the optimized reaction conditions (90 oC, BzOH/TBHP = 2, 4 h, and 20 wt.% of catalyst). Furthermore, the stability of the catalyst was examined through the reusability of the SO42-/Zr-OMC (30) catalyst up to the 5th run. This result revealed the stability of the prepared SO42-/Zr-OMC (30) catalyst, which was associated with its physicochemical properties