(718c) Surface Plasmon Mediated Highly Selective Epoxidation of Propene Over Cu Catalyst

Propylene oxide (PO) is a valuable commodity chemical that is still commercially produced using expensive, environmentally harmful homogeneous routes, due to the difficulties associated with developing a heterogeneous catalyst that can perform direct propylene epoxidation to produce PO using oxygen or air as an oxidant. Therefore, the development of direct heterogeneous process that uses oxygen as an oxidant for producing PO is highly desirable. In this contribution, we demonstrate that plasmonic copper nanostructure based catalyst can exhibit higher propylene oxide selectivity in the direct epoxidation of propene compared to other conventional catalysts. We also demonstrate that the nanostructured copper catalyst can efficiently couple low intensity visible light with thermal energy under photothermal conditions (light on) to form higher PO selectivity compared to thermal conditions (light off). Our analysis suggests that this visible light effect on the propylene oxide selectivity on copper nanostructure is due to surface plasmon induced electron mediated process.