Facile Preparation of Oxygen-Vacancy-Mediated Mn<sub>3</sub>O<sub>4</sub> for Catalytic Transfer Hydrogenation of Furfural
Hui Yang, Hao Chen, Wenwen Lin, Zhenya Zhang, Ming-Wei Weng, Wenhua Zhou, Haoan Fan, Jie Fu
Abstract
The conversion of biobased furfural (FF) into furfuryl alcohol (FA) has immense industrial significance; however, the catalyst preparation methods for the conversion of FF to FA are demanding. We demonstrated a facile method, direct calcination of manganese(II) acetate tetrahydrate, to prepare an oxygen-vacant Mn3O4 catalyst for the catalytic transfer hydrogenation (CTH) of FF to FA. The characterization results of oxygen-vacant Mn3O4 along with commercial and conventional Mn3O4 indicate that surface oxygen vacancies, strong acid–base properties, and a porous structure facilitate the high yield of FA (>99%) obtained from FF at 220 °C for 4 h in isopropanol. The oxygen vacancy-mediated Mn3O4 could be reused five times without noticeable activity loss. Moreover, we confirmed that Mn3O4 obtained from various manganese(II) salts by the direct calcination method also exhibited good performance for the CTH of FF to FA.