New Perspective in Recent Solid Acid Catalyst

This paper will review on the latest development on solid acid catalysts used in industries as well in research activities. Application of heterogeneous acid catalysis becomes current trend for many industries due to world wide environmental concern. Conventional synthetic or natural zeolites widely used for petrochemical processing, has some limitation because its pore size is normally smaller than reactant molecules. To overcome this challenge new delaminated zeolite process was introduced. In this process specific synthetic zeolite (i.e. ferrierite) was swelled up using specific surfactant followed by sonification to produce the delaminated zeolite. Further modification of this material such as sulfonification reaction to its surface has been found to improve the catalytic activity and selectivity for esterification reaction. Other acid catalyst systems based on mesoporous molecular sieves and Keggin heteropolyacids (HPA) are also discussed in this paper.