Breaking the Limit of Lignin Monomer Production via Cleavage of Interunit Carbon–Carbon Linkages

By Lin Dong, Longfei Lin, Xue Han, Xiaoqin Si, Xiao-hui Liu, Yong Guo, Fang Lu, S. Rudić, S. Parker, Sihai Yang and 1 more. Chem, 2019

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Conversion of lignin into monocyclic hydrocarbons as commodity chemicals and drop-in fuels is a highly desirable target for biorefineries. However, this is severely hindered by the presence of stable interunit carbon–carbon linkages in native lignin and those formed during lignin extraction. Herein, we report a new multifunctional catalyst, Ru/NbOPO4, that achieves the first example of catalytic cleavage of both interunit C–C and C–O bonds in one-pot lignin conversions to yield 124%–153% of monocyclic hydrocarbons, which is 1.2–1.5 times the yields obtained from the established nitrobenzene oxidation method. This catalyst also exhibits high stability and selectivity (up to 68%) to monocyclic arenes over repeated cycles. The mechanism of the activation and cleavage of 5–5 C–C bonds in biphenyl, as a lignin model adopting the most robust C–C linkages, has been revealed via in situ inelastic neutron scattering coupled with modeling. This study breaks the conventional theoretical limit on lignin monomer production.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8368f00ce5d954a5d134ce43f86320d46e58aa6