9022
Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2007, 46, 9022-9031
Kinetics of Citral Hydrogenation by Supported Ionic Liquid Catalysts (SILCA) for Fine Chemicals Pasi Virtanen,* Jyri-Pekka Mikkola, and Tapio Salmi Laboratory of Industrial Chemistry, Process Chemistry Centre, Åbo Akademi, FI-20500, Turku/Åbo, Finland
The use of ionic liquids in catalysis is attracting interesting attention in chemical engineering. Supported ionic liquid catalyst (SILCA) compounds consist of immobilized catalytic species (e.g., transition metal particles residing in an ionic liquid layer immobilized on a solid support). In this work, the kinetics of SILCA compounds has been studied in detail and a mechanistic kinetic model, which describes the differences in selectivity and activity of the catalysts that contain different ionic liquids, has been developed. 1. Introduction The research in the field of ionic liquids has increased since the early 1990s, when the first air- and moisture-stable ionic liquids were discovered.1 From those days, the number of publications, considering ionic liquids, has increased exponentially.2 Ionic liquids are ionic compounds, just like ordinary table salt (sodium chloride), but they have many exceptional properties, in comparison to conventional ionic compounds. The main difference is their significantly lower melting point. For example, sodium chloride has a melting point of 801 °C, when many ionic liquids have a melting point of
