(582v) Resin Based Solid Acid Catalyst for Dehydration of Fructose to HMF

Sustainable chemical production can be achieved through using biomass. A key biomass conversion strategy produces 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), an important platform chemical that has applications for manufacturing solvents, polymer precursors, and fuel additives. HMF can be produced by dehydrating fructose under acidic conditions, thus allowing us to exploit the renewable carbon source i.e. lignocellulosic biomass. The studies to understand the fructose dehydration suggest that the HMF production is more favored in organic solvents. However, separating HMF from bulk organic solvents is an energy intensive process given the high boiling point of the bulk solvent. To make this process more sustainable work is being done to design catalysts that can selectively dehydrate fructose to HMF while using water as the bulk solvent. In this work, we present a bifunctional resin based catalyst with polystyrene backbone for selective dehydration of fructose to HMF in water. The effect of individual functional groups and loading of functional groups on the conversion and selectivity are studied. Overall, in this work we present a bifunctional catalyst design to modify the catalytic site to improve the conversion and selectivity of fructose dehydration to HMF.