Transfer Dehydrogenation Of Alcohols Over Ceria Supported Catalysts

The oxidation of alcohols to carbonyl compounds is a fundamental process in organic synthesis and the production of fine chemicals. Much effort have been devoted to the discovery and development of efficient catalytic procedures employing O₂ (or air) or hydrogen peroxide as the ultimate oxidant, since they are relatively cheap and green oxidants.Transfer dehydrogenation of alcohols in the liquid phase promoted by series of CeO₂ supported catalysts was first investigated in this thesis. The CeO₂ supported catalysts prepared by a modified deposition-precipitation method exhibited good performance in the transfer dehydrogenation process under a very mild condition, particularly for the aliphatic secondary alcohols. In the case of 2-octanol, the ceria supported Cu and Pd catalysts were more active then the catalysts reported in the literatures. Moreover, the 3 wt% Ir/CeO₂ showed extremely high activities with a TOF value of 16h^-1.The transfer dehydrogenation of alcohols is safe and efficient route for this transformation. To the best of our knowledge, the Ir/CeO₂ is the first report about supported Ir catalyst used for the reaction, and it is more active then the catalysts reported in the literatures.The remarkable performance of the ceria-supported catalysts could attribute to the interaction between the metal and the support. The similar activity sequences of different alcohols over different catalysts gave a clue to the investigation of the mechanism. A reasonable mechanism was proposed in this thesis together with some experiments as evidence.