Transfer hydrogenation of furfural to furfuryl alcohol over Keggin zirconium-heteropoly acid

Abstract At present, energy and environmental issues are receiving more and more attention. It is extremely urgent to find energy-saving and environmentally-friendly materials. Here, we successfully synthesized zirconium phosphotungstate(Zr-PW) for catalytic transfer hydrogenation(CTH) of furfural(FF) to furfuryl alcohol(FA). As expected, zirconium phosphotungstate(Zr-PW) showed excellent catalytic performance for the conversion of FF to FA with the yield of FA reached 98.64% at 120 °C for 1 h. The physical properties of catalyst were analyzed systematically by various characterization methods. The results show that the catalysts have abundants acid-base pairs, which was the principal reason for excellent performance. Finally, the catalyst could be re-useable for six times without apparent inactivation and the possible reaction mechanism was proposed.