Screening of supports and additives for heteropoly acid catalysts for friedel-crafts reaction by high-throughput screening and data mining

Abstract

Friedel-Crafts alkylations are very important reactions which are widely used in the production of fine chemicals, intermediates, and petrochemicals. Solid catalysts should be developed for greening of these chemical processes. We previously developed a high-throughput screening system (HTS) and had been screening solid catalysts for benzylation of anisole by benzyl alcohol. In the present study, supports and additives for 12 tungstophosphoric acid (HPA) catalysts were screened by HTS and data mining tools using principal component analysis, radial basis function network, and support vector machine. These methods identified Re-HPA/activated carbon with the highest activity, which was experimentally confirmed.