Global scientific community has turned its attention for production of biofuels, and very intense research is pursued in this direction last decade. Biofuels gained huge cynosure as this energy is renewable and sustainable unlike fossil fuels which has limited abundance and environmentally non-benign. Diesel and jet-fuel are the two types, which are in most demand. Diesel and jet fuels typically contain carbon chain lengths between 10-20. These fuels can be produced when we have abundant furans available in the form of alkylated furans such as methyl furans or furfurals. Methyl furans and furfurals can be converted to jet or diesel fuels through reactions such as hydroxyalkylation, alkylation or aldol condensation followed by hydrolysis and hydrodeoxygenation. Thus furans serve as synthetic precursors for jet and diesel fuels. To date, very limited results have been published for the production of furans from biomass. Conventionally, furans are produced from biomass using solid acid catalysts through a biphasic batch reactor. For the first time, we report selective production of furans from catalytic fast pyrolysis of biomass using molybdenum incorporated three dimensionally pore structured (KIT-5) mesoporous silica as heterogeneous catalyst.
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