Highly Selective Hydrogenation of Furfural to Cyclopentanone over a NiFe Bimetallic Catalyst in a Methanol/Water Solution with a Solvent Effect

The aqueous phase hydrogenation of furfural to cyclopentanone over a NiFe bimetallic catalyst was investigated for the efficient utilization of biomass-derived compounds. Catalyst characterization by XRD, EDS mapping, and TPR revealed significant synergetic effects in the NiFe/SBA-15 catalyst. With NiFe/SBA-15, cyclopentanone selectivity was increased to 78.4% from 46.1% with Ni/SBA-15. The use of different supports showed that weak acidity favors cyclopentanone formation. The solvent played an important role: methanol/water solutions with different compositional ratios gave significantly changed product distributions. With pure methanol, and methanol-dominated and water-dominated solutions, respectively, the main product was furfuryl alcohol, tetrahydrofurfuryl alcohol, and cyclopentanone. Furfural in the water inhibited THFA formation, which led furfural to preferentially produce cyclopentanone. At the optimized reaction temperature, NiFe/SBA-15 in water gave 99.8% furfural conversion and 90% cyclopentanone yield at 300 min, which was much better than most reported nonprecious metal catalysts.