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 catalyst are a lot cheaper, but they have much lower turnover in this reaction. This talk will describe research in our laboratory to improve the activity and turnover of vanadium catalysts in this reaction by bimetallic cooperativity. Our hypothesis is that electronic coupling of two vanadyl centers results in faster two-electron cycling steps, by reducing barriers associated with the vanadium spin state. We show that this strategy increases catalytic rate in aerobic diol cleavage and the cleavage of lignin model complexes. Finally, we present our preliminary results on organosolv lignin.

Speaker Presentation Slides

Guest Speakers

Speaker: Robert Comito
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry

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