Synthesis of eugenyl acetate through heterogeneous catalysis

Acetylation of Eugenol over 12-Molybdophosphoric Acid Anchored in Mesoporous Silicate Support Synthesized from Flint Kaolin

“…According to Laroque et al [11] and Santos et al [18] with the increase of the temperature there is a reduction of the viscosity of the reaction mixture favoring the interaction between active sites of the catalyst and the substrates, thus raising the reaction rate in the acetylation of eugenol. On the one hand, these results are in good agreement with those reported by Tischer et al [10] using Lewatit ® GF 101 and, on the other hand, are better than those obtained with UDCaT-5/Zr [2].…”

“…Knowing the mechanisms of the reaction under study, it is known that autocatalysis can occur [4,10], therefore, tests were carried out under the conditions studied without the catalyst and it was observed that the autoconversion did not exceed 35% (Figure 8). This shows that the high performance of the catalyst in the rate of reaction of the reaction is directly proportional to the load of the catalyst based on the total volume of the reaction [2,10,11,82,83]. The catalyst loading was varied from 1% to 4%, relative to eugenol masses, maintaining a 1:5 molar ratio.…”

“…However, in high concentrations, it has an adverse effect of provoking inflammatory and allergic reactions, possibly due to its low instability, which favors the formation of phenoxyl radicals via its pro-oxidant activity [2,9]. Despite the fact that its structure is polyfunctional and readily accessible, eugenol is considered as a useful starting material for producing valuable derivatives through chemical synthesis [2,10,11,12,13,14,15] or biochemistry [1,4,9,16,17,18].…”

“…Most of the time the current chemical route to synthesize eugenol esters is quite problematic by making use of homogeneous catalysis [13,21,23,24], causing serious problems of reactor corrosion, volatile generation of unwanted effluents, impurity and unsatisfactory yield of the product, as well as a possible adverse impact on the environment, and in this sense the search for alternative heterogeneous catalysts has been constant [2,9,20]. Biocatalytic processes to obtain the ester, in spite of being alternative and environmentally friendly, in many cases still present high costs, mainly when immobilized, besides the low reuse capacity [1,10,16].…”

“…Thus, the use of heterogeneous catalysts is particularly advantageous because they are versatile, possess high operational efficiency under moderate reaction conditions, and additionally they provide a more ecological and economical route for esterification reactions [25,26,27,28,29,30,31]. In recent years, some acidic solids have been used as catalysts for the esterification or acetylation of eugenol, for example modified acid zirconia (UDCaT-5) [2] and ionic resins [10,11,12], which not only can be easily recovered and reused, but also favored the development of continuous production processes for a series of industrially important productions.…”