Hydrolysis of Cellulose by Magnetic Poly(ionic liquid) Nanocatalyst Based on Poly(vinylimidazolium sulfonic acid)

Hypothesis: Cellulose is the most abundant source of biomass, and it has a potential ability to become an alternative to fossil resources for sustainable production of chemicals and fuels for preventing global warming by decreasing atmospheric CO2 generated from the consumption of fossil fuels. Mildly hydrothermal method using solid acid catalysts for production of glucose from cellulose can be one of the key technologies for a future sustainable society using cellulose biomass.

In this manuscript, an acidic poly(ionic liquid) coated magnetic nanoparticle catalyst was successfully synthesized by polymerization of vinylimidazolium sulfonic acid in the presence of surface modified magnetic nanoparticles. The poly(ionic liquid) coated magnetic nanoparticle was prepared by distillation-precipitation-polymerization in the absence of any surfactant. Direct attachment of SO3H to imidazole groups in polymeric chains resulted to generation of highly dual acidic poly(ionic liquid) which can be used as a Bronsted acid catalyst. Since, the monomers make the catalyst bed, the catalyst has high loading level of acidic groups comparing to other heterogeneous acid catalysts. The resultant catalyst was characterized by various instrumental analyses such as FTIR, TGA, XRD, VSM, AA and TEM. Finding: The resulting ionic heterogeneous catalyst is shown to be an efficient catalyst in hydrolysis of cellulose and gave high yield of glucose. The synthesized acidic catalyst was compared to industrial and mineral acids and the results showed higher selectivity of the presence catalyst. The catalyst was also separated by using an external magnet and reused in other runs. All the results proved that the present catalyst has better performance compared to other reported catalysts and lower amounts of catalyst was required to complete the reaction. All the results show that the presented catalyst and protocol can be scaled up