Application of Response Surface Methodology as an Efficient Approach for Optimization of Operational Variables in Benzene Hydroxylation to Phenol by V/SBA-16 Nanoporous Catalyst

Herein, we prepared a v/sba-16 catalyst using vanadyl acetylacetonate as a precursor and sba-16 nanoporous silica as a support via an immobilization technique. the ordered mesoporous structure of catalyst was determined by x-ray diffraction and transmission electron microscopy techniques, and the catalyst was evaluated in the benzene hydroxylation to phenol with hydrogen peroxide (h2o2) as a green oxidant. the effects of three key factors, namely reaction temperature (°c), h2o2 content (ml) and catalyst amount (g) at five levels (-1.68, -1, 0, +1, +1.68), and also their interaction on the phenol yield were investigated using response surface methodology combined with central composite design. the high correlation coefficient (r^2), i.e., 0.983, showed that the data predicted using rsm were in good agreement with the experimental results. the optimization results also exhibited that high phenol yield (17.09%) was achieved at the optimized values of the operating variables: the reaction temperature of 61 °c, h2o2 content of 1.69 ml and a catalyst amount of 0.1 g. in addition, response surface methodology provides a reliable method for optimizingprocess variables for benzene hydroxylation to phenol, with the minimum number of experiments.