| Summary: | ε-Caprolactone is traditionally produced through Baeyer-Villiger oxidation of cyclohexanone oxidized by peracids in industry, which inevitably results in large discard acid and environmental pollution. To this end, a green route to ε-caprolactone was developed by coupling the direct generation of hydrogen peroxide from aerobic oxidation of benzhydrol catalyzed by NHPI and Baeyer-Villiger oxidation of cyclohexanone with the in situ hydrogen peroxide over Sn-Beta zeolites in one pot. Molecular oxygen was employed as the terminal oxidant, and the effects of several reaction factors were studied. Compared with one-step process, the one-pot two-step method noticeably improved the selectivity of ε-caprolactone. When the amount of in situ hydrogen peroxide was 0.72 equivalent, the selectivity of ε-caprolactone was obtained 94.8% with 39.2% conversion of cyclohexanone, and the efficiency of H2O2 was up to 51.5%. As compared to the commercial 30 wt% aqueous H2O2 added directly, in situ H2O2 dramatically improved the selectivity of ε-caprolactone and had higher efficiency. Additionally, the catalyst could be easily separated from the reaction solution and reused several times without the remarkable loss of activity.
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