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WOx/C Heterogeneous Catalyst with Oxygen Vacancies and Deficient Brönsted Acid for Epoxidation of 1-Hexene

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Abstract

WOx has good performance in olefin epoxidation, however, the presence of a large amount of Brönsted acid on WOx affects the selectivity of epoxy products. In this paper, broken carbon spheres (b-C spheres) treated with nitric acid were used as support to anchor WOx in dynamic solvothermal process. Based on GC–MS and GC-IR detection, the obtained WOx/C greatly increased selectivity of 1,2-epoxyhexane from 16.0% (pure WOx) to 92.1% in epoxidation of 1-hexene. The improvement of WOx performance is attributed to the reduction of Brönsted acid sites and electron cloud density after loading, which may all result from interaction between WOx and oxygen-containing functional groups of b-C spheres. Above changes not only effectively inhibit the hydrolysis of 1,2-epoxyhexane, but also are conducive to nucleophilic reaction of H2O2 to WOx, which is beneficial to the activation of H2O2. Finally, an epoxidation mechanism with oxygen vacancies as the main route under WOx/C catalysis is reasonably proposed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21972158), Joint Fund of the Yulin University and the Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy (Grant. YLU-DNL Fund 2021017), Research Project of Shanxi Scholarship Council of China (No. 2020-196), Foundation of State Key Laboratory of High-efficiency Utilization of Coal and Green Chemical Engineering (No. 2021-K10), Innovation Academy for Green Manufacture CAS (No. IAGM2020C10), Shanxi Province Science Foundation for Youths (201901D211583, 20210302124625), Doctoral Start-up Foundation of Shanxi Province (SQ2019006), Natural Science Foundation of Shanxi Province (No. 20210302123006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Coal Conversion, Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Taiyuan, 030001, China

    Xiangying Xing, Huixiang Wang, Jing Shi, Penghui Li, Jingzhao Ren, Liancheng Wang & Baoliang Lv

  2. State Key Laboratory of High-Efficiency Utilization of Coal and Green Chemical Engineering, Ningxia University, Yinchuan, 750021, China

    Jianli Zhang & Baoliang Lv

  3. Key Laboratory of Comprehensive and Highly Efficient Utilization of Salt Lake Resources, Qinghai Institute of Salt Lakes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xining, 810008, China

    Zhong Liu

  4. Innovation Academy for Green Manufacture, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Zhong Liu & Baoliang Lv

  5. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Xiangying Xing, Jing Shi, Penghui Li & Jingzhao Ren

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Xing, X., Wang, H., Shi, J. et al. WOx/C Heterogeneous Catalyst with Oxygen Vacancies and Deficient Brönsted Acid for Epoxidation of 1-Hexene. Catal Lett 153, 1180–1192 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10562-022-04054-8

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