Furfural hydrogenation over carbon‐supported copper

Abstract

Furfural hydrogenation over copper dispersed on three forms of carbon – activated carbon, diamond and graphitized fibers – were studied. Only hydrogenation of the C=O bond to form either furfuryl alcohol or 2‐methyl furan occurred at temperatures from 473 to 573 K. Reduction at 573 K gave the most active catalysts, all three catalysts had activation energies of 16 kcal/mol, and turnover frequencies were 0.018–0.032 s^-1 based on the number of Cu⁰ + Cu⁺ sites, which were counted by N₂O adsorption at 363 K and CO adsorption at 300 K, respectively. The Cu/activated carbon catalyst showed no deactivation during 10 h on stream, in contrast to the other two catalysts. A simple Langmuir–Hinshelwood model invoking two types of sites was able to fit all kinetic data quite satisfactorily, thus it was consistent with the presence of both Cu⁰ and Cu⁺ sites.