Abstract
Depolymerization of lignin into aromatic compounds in high yield for production of fuels and chemicals is vital to realize an economically competitive biorefinery. In this study, undoped and nickel-doped bulk molybdenum carbides were synthesized and evaluated in reductive depolymerization of lignin model compound and corn stover lignin in the presence of hydrogen. The highest lignin monomer yield of 37.3% was obtained with Ni-Mo2C and ethanol/water solvent. Nickel doping promoted the depolymerization performance of Mo2C, by increasing the number of metallic sites while decreasing that of acidic sites. This change in active site distribution mitigated C–C coupling reactions and coking. Ethanol addition to the water solvent also significantly suppressed C–C coupling. Mixing carbides with zeolites decreased monomer yields, presumably due to excessive repolymerization of reactive intermediates over the acidic zeolite. This work highlights the feasibility of developing effective lignin depolymerization catalysts by fine-tuning the properties of molybdenum carbide catalysts and solvent systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 528-535 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Fuel |
| Volume | 244 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 15 2019 |
Funding
Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).This work was performed in part at the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a national scientific user facility sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, operated for the Department of Energy by Battelle. The authors would like to thank Ms. Heather Job and Ms. Marie S. Swita who helped with the high throughput experiments and collected some GC–MS data for this project. In addition, the authors thank Dr. Melvin Tucker and Mr. Eric Kuhn from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for insightful discussions. Dr. X. Yang was partially supported by CSC Scholarship for Overseas Studies. The work at ORNL was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office. The authors would like to thank Mrs. Beth Armstrong, Dr. Michelle Kidder and Dr. Ercan Cakmak at ORNL for help with Ni-MoO 3 precursor synthesis, N 2 sorption experiments and XRD analysis, respectively. This work was supported by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory Subcontract (Grant number AEV-6–52054-01 ) under Prime U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Award (Grant number DE-AC36-08G028308), the Sun Grant-U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Award (Grant number T0013G-A-Task 8), and the Joint Center for Aerospace Technology Innovation with the Bioproducts, Science & Engineering Laboratory and Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Washington State University. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC under.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| EMSL | |
| Office of Biological and Environmental Research | |
| William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC36-08G028308 |
| U.S. Department of Transportation | T0013G-A-Task 8 |
| Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy | |
| National Renewable Energy Laboratory | AEV-6–52054-01 |
| Washington State University | |
| China Scholarship Council |
Keywords
- Alkali corn stover lignin
- Depolymerization reaction
- Molybdenum carbide
- Nickel
- Veratrylglycero-β-guaiacyl ether
