Acetalization of furfural with zeolites under benign reaction conditions

Acetalization is a viable method to protect carbonyl functionalities in organic compounds and offers apotential synthetic strategy for synthesizing derived chemicals. In this work, several families of commer-cial zeolites have been employed as solid acid catalysts in the acetalization of furfural to form furfuraldiethyl acetal at room temperature using ethanol as a renewable solvent.

Among the tested catalysts,H-USY (6) provided the highest catalytic activity (79% acetal yield), excellent selectivity and reusabilityin five consecutive reaction runs. Process parameters such as, e.g. reaction time, catalyst loading andapplicability of different lower alcohols were evaluated and optimized