Synergistic hydrogenolysis of biomass furfuryl alcohol over Ru/solid base catalysts in hydrothermal reaction environment

In this paper, Ru/solid base catalysts were employed to realize the direct hydrogenolysis of furfuryl alcohol into tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol and 1,2-pentanediol. Moreover, the catalyst preparation, activation and reaction conditions were screened. It was found that the yield and selectivity of 1,2-pentanediol were improved by the preparation of Ru based catalyst with basic metal oxides as support. The total yield of tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol (53%) and 1,2-pentanediol (32%) was 85% under the optimal reaction conditions over Ru/MnO 2 . Subsequently, N 2 adsorption-desorption, XRD and XPS were employed to reveal the catalytic mechanism which suggested that the synergistic between the surface basic groups and active metals might account for the better catalytic performance.