MATOS, J.; OCARES, J.; POON, P.; GARCÍA, X.; TITIRICI, M.; ANIA, C.:
Proceedings of the world conference on carbon (Carbon 2018), July 2018.
Introduction
Solar fuels are a promising strategy since they are produced from simple and abundant molecules using a renewable energy source such as sunlight. However, the efficiency of photocatalysts is still low and far for the practical application. The H2 production by direct water splitting1 using TiO2 and the CO2 reduction are the two main reactions concerning with solar fuels. It has been widely showed that noble metal/graphene-based catalysts are suitable for these reactions. A third way poorly studied correspond to the photo assisted valorization of molecules such as furfuryl alcohol (FA) and 5-hydroximethyl furfural (5-HMF) because they are important products of the biorefinery industry. In addition, glycerol (Gly) is the main by-product of biodiesel industry with an important economic devaluation. The FA and Gly photo assisted valorisation to selectively produce aldehydes or ketones is an important strategy to obtain more valuable compounds such as five or six-member dioxane- based carbocycles. In this sense, this work explores a photocatalytic approach for the valorization of FA, 5-HMF and Gly by using C-doped and Cu-containing TiO2-based catalysts, under solar light.