Catalytic oxidation using nitrous oxide

Abstract

Nitrous oxide is a very inert gas used generally as oxidant as it offers some advantage compared with other oxidants such as O2 but a considerably higher temperature (> 526 °C) is often required. For particular cases such as the oxidation of sugar alcohols, especially for the oxidation of primary alcohols to aldehydes, N2O has the advantage over O2 of a higher reaction selectivity. In the present paper we present the modelling of oxidation reaction of sugar alcohols using an oxidizing agent in low concentrations, which is important to suppress subsequent oxidation reactions due to the very low residual concentrations of the oxidizing agent. For orientation experiments we chose nitrous oxide generated by thermal decomposition of ammonium nitrate. Kinetic modeling of the reaction was performed after determination of the differential equations that describe the system under study. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2017.