Continuous Flow Reactor for Hydroxylation of Benzene to Phenol by Hydrogen Peroxide

The direct hydroxylation of benzene to phenol catalyzed by activated carbon-supported Fe (Fe/AC) in acetonitrile using H₂O₂ as the oxidant was studied in a continuous flow reactor. Results showed that the continuous operation could obtain high phenol yield of 28.1%, coupled with the turnover frequency of 3 h^-1, and high selectivity of 98% under mild condition. The catalyst was characterized by N₂ adsorption/desorption, Boehm titration, X-ray photoelectron spectra, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. It was observed that iron may interact with the carboxyl group forming iron-carboxylate like species, which act as the active phase. The apparent activation energy obtained by fitting an Arrhenius model to the experimental data was 13.4 kJ/mol. The reaction order was calculated to be about 1, 0.2 for benzene and 0.7 for H₂O₂.