Recent Advances in the Brønsted/Lewis Acid Catalyzed Conversion of Glucose to HMF and Lactic Acid: Pathways toward Bio-Based Plastics

One of the most trending topics in catalysis recently is the use of renewable sources and/or non-waste technologies to generate products with high added value. That is why, the present review resumes the advances in catalyst design for biomass chemical valorization. The variety of involved reactions and functionality of obtained molecules requires the use of multifunctional catalyst able to increase the efficiency and selectivity of the selected process. The use of glucose as platform molecule is proposed here and its use as starting point for biobased plastics production is revised with special attention paid to the proposed tandem Bronsted/Lewis acid catalysts.

Noble-Metal-Free NixSy-C3N5 Hybrid Nanosheet with Highly Efficient Photocatalytic Performance

The construction of highly efficient, low-cost and noble-metal-free photocatalysts depends on photocatalytic technology. Recently, N-rich C3N5 has been explored as a novel carbon nitride material with a much narrower band gap (~2.2 eV) than that of traditional C3N4 (~2.7 eV). Planting noble-metal-free active sites on C3N5 to improve its photocatalytic activity is of great significance. Herein, 2D NixSy nanosheet is facially loaded on 2D C3N5 using a hydrothermal procedure under a low temperature. Due to the quick separation of photogenerated carries between C3N5 and NixSy, this inexpensive noble-metal-free NixSy-C3N5 hybrid nanosheet is highly efficient and stable as a multifunctional catalyst in various applications, including photocatalytic H2 production from water and NO removal. Impressively, the apparent quantum yield (AQY) value for H2 production reaches 37.0% (at 420 nm) on optimal NixSy-C3N5 hybrids, which is much higher than that of Pt-C3N5 material. This work opens an avenue to the fabrication of low-cost and noble-metal-free catalysts for multifunctional photocatalytic applications.