Mengtian Fan, Shaojun Xu, Bing An, Alena M Sheveleva, Alexander Betts, Joseph Hurd, Zhaodong Zhu, Meng He, Dinu Iuga, Longfei Lin, Xinchen Kang, Christopher M A Parlett, Floriana Tuna, Eric Jl McInnes, Luke L Keenan, Daniel Lee, Martin P Attfield, Sihai Yang
The production of conjugated C4-C5 dienes from biomass can enable the sustainable synthesis of many important polymers and liquid fuels. Here, we report the first example of bimetallic (Nb, Al)-atomically doped mesoporous silica, denoted as AlNb-MCM-41, which affords quantitative conversion of 2-methyltetrahydrofuran (2-MTHF) to pentadienes with a high selectivity of 91%. The incorporation of Al(III) and Nb(V) sites into the framework of AlNb-MCM-41 has effectively tuned the nature and distribution of Lewis and Brønsted acid sites within the structure...
October 14, 2022: Angewandte Chemie