heteropoly tungstate supported on metal oxide catalysts for liquid phase oxidation of benzyl alcohol with hydrogen peroxide

A series of metal oxide supported tungstophosphoric acid catalysts were prepared by impregnation. the physicochemical and acidic properties of these materials were characterized by a variety of different analytical and spectroscopic techniques, namely fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ftir), x-ray diffraction (xrd), brunauer-emmett-teller (bet) method, and nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr), and exploited as heterogeneous catalysts for selective oxidation of benzyl alcohol (bzoh) with hydrogen peroxide (h 2 o 2 ). among them, 20 wt.% h 3 pw 12 o 40 /ceo 2 catalyst exhibited the best oxidative activity. further process optimization by response surface methodology (rsm) based on the box-behnken design model resulted in a benzyl alcohol conversion of 95.2% and a benzaldehyde yield of 94.2% with 98.9% selectivity, in good agreement with the experimental results. kinetic studies based on an irreversible parallel reaction model led to an activation energy (e a ) of 44.73 kj mol -1