Lignin Valorization with Earth-Abundant Metal Catalysis
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Lignin is a large component of terrestrial biomass that has few known applications. Valorization of this byproduct could improve the economics of biomass utilization, including renewable fuel applications.
Catalytic approaches to depolymerize lignin to commodity chemicals remain poorly scalable because they use expensive metals. Vanadium catalysts are much cheaper, but they have significantly lower turnover in this reaction.
This talk will describe research in our laboratory aimed at improving the activity and turnover of vanadium catalysts in this reaction by employing bimetallic cooperativity. Our hypothesis is that the electronic coupling of two vanadyl centers results in faster two-electron cycling steps by reducing barriers associated with the vanadium spin state.
We demonstrate that this strategy increases the catalytic rate in both aerobic diol cleavage and the cleavage of lignin model complexes. Lastly, we present our preliminary results on organosolv lignin.
- Location
- Online
- Cost
- Free