With the help of a new type of catalyst, Indian researchers successfully converted the petroleum waste toluene into benzoic acid, which can be used as a food preservative and a drug against fungal and bacterial infections. Related papers were published online in the Dutch "Applied Catalysis B: Environment" recently.
In general, complex organic reactions use organic solvents, which makes the reaction more expensive and produces toxic waste. Unlike previous methods, researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology used water as a solvent and used a green oxidant called t-butyl hydroperoxide (TBHP) to convert toluene. Toluene oxidation usually produces four products, but after using a new bis-naphthol to stabilize platinum nanocatalyst, only benzoic acid is produced.
According to the researchers, platinum nanoparticles are generally unstable in nature, because they tend to aggregate into large particles and their catalytic activity will be reduced. The researchers used bisnaphthol as a stabilizer to combine with the platinum nanoparticles to prevent the platinum nanoparticles from agglomerating and make it easy to handle. Experiments have shown that the particle size has not changed after the new catalyst is reused 5 times.
The researchers also found that using TBHP alone as an oxidant requires a large amount of toluene to convert. Four parts of TBHP can only convert one part of toluene, which is not cost-effective. Therefore, they also use molecular oxygen as a co-oxidant, so that only two parts of TBHP are needed to produce one part of toluene, which not only helps to reduce costs, but also improves the yield of benzoic acid.
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