The enormous fossil fuel consumption has generated major environmental challenges such as increased CO2 emission, global warming and other environmental issues. Chemical industries are moving towards the production of bulk and fine chemicals from renewable resources such as biomass to overcome the impact caused by the consumption of fossil fuels.
This thesis aims to investigate and develop new efficient heterogeneous catalysts for the conversion of biomass-derived compounds to value-added chemicals. In particular, work focused on developing heterogeneous catalysts comprised of supported metal nanoparticles for the conversion of biomass-derived C1 to C3 platform chemicals, i.e. formic acid, ethanol and acetone to industrially significant chemicals such as hydrogen, acetaldehyde, 1,3-butadiene and methyl isobutyl ketone. As part of this work, zeolites and nitrogen-doped ordered mesoporous carbon were used as porous materials to support nano-sized transition metals such as gold, palladium, zinc and copper. In an efficient catalytic process, highly active, selective and stable catalyst in an optimum condition is vital for its commercial application. The project investigated the effect of various parameters including morphology of zeolites, encapsulation methods of nanoparticles in porous supports, nitrogen doping on ordered mesoporous and bimetallic catalytic system on catalytic performance and identified an optimum catalyst for each application.
The work has shown that supported nanoparticles can help to provide a green alternative to produce value-added chemicals from biomass-derived chemicals. This work, therefore, opens up numerous opportunities to synthesis industrially important chemicals from biomass-derived compounds using heterogeneous catalysis thereby helping to reduce the CO2 emission and limit global warming.