Valorization of biomass to chemicals using microporous and mesoporous materials

The epic challenge of the 21st century is filling the gap between energy, fuels and chemicals supplies and demands with clean, reliable and inexpensive resources. To this end, the main challenge of the thesis is the promotion of sustainable policies that spur economic growth and environmental protection in a global context, particularly in terms of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Using biomass as a resource can assist at meeting the proposed policies for a safe, green, and sustainable future. Therefore, this thesis took the advantages of different micro-mesoporous heterogenous catalysts for valorization of different biomass-derived model components to valuable biochemicals. The first step of research focused on using the carbohydrate fraction of lignocellulosic biomass (glucose and cellulose) and their conversion to levulinic acid over ion-exchanged ZSM-5 zeolite prepared by different techniques, HMS mesoporous silica and their composites as the catalysts. In addition, a further transformation of levulinic acid to γ-Valerolactone was studied over bifunctional Ni,Al/activated biochar based catalysts. The second step of the work focused on essential oil fraction of lignocellulosic biomass (citronellal) and its one-pot transformation to menthol over Ni/H-Beta based catalysts. The results obtained from catalysts characterisation helped on providing a correlation between the chemical, textural and morphological properties of the catalysts with their different efficiencies in the studied reactions.

The epic challenge of the 21st century is filling the gap between energy, fuels and chemicals supplies and demands with clean, reliable and inexpensive resources. To this end, the main challenge of the thesis is the promotion of sustainable policies that spur economic growth and environmental protection in a global context, particularly in terms of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Using biomass as a resource can assist at meeting the proposed policies for a safe, green, and sustainable future. Therefore, this thesis took the advantages of different micro-mesoporous heterogenous catalysts for valorization of different biomass-derived model components to valuable biochemicals. The first step of research focused on using the carbohydrate fraction of lignocellulosic biomass (glucose and cellulose) and their conversion to levulinic acid over ion-exchanged ZSM-5 zeolite prepared by different techniques, HMS mesoporous silica and their composites as the catalysts. In addition, a further transformation of levulinic acid to γ-Valerolactone was studied over bifunctional Ni,Al/activated biochar based catalysts. The second step of the work focused on essential oil fraction of lignocellulosic biomass (citronellal) and its one-pot transformation to menthol over Ni/H-Beta based catalysts. The results obtained from catalysts characterisation helped on providing a correlation between the chemical, textural and morphological properties of the catalysts with their different efficiencies in the studied reactions.