Highly selective cleavage C–O ether bond of lignin model compounds over Ni/CaO–H-ZSM-5 in ethanol

Herein, 2-(2-methoxyphenoxy)-1-phenylethanol (β-O-4), 2-methoxyphenyl anisole (α-O-4) and 4-phenoxyphenol (4-O-5) were selected as typical lignin model compounds. Given the effectiveness of traditional acid–base catalysts for lignin depolymerisation, a novel Ni/CaO–H-ZSM-5(60) catalyst was prepared to investigate the difficulty level of C–O bond of three model compounds cleavage in ethanol. It was observed that Ni/CaO–H-ZSM-5(60) had prominent performance on the C–O bond cleavage at very mild conditions (140 °C, 1 MPa H(2)). Among them, the C–O bond of α-O-4 and β-O-4 could be completely cleaved within 60 min. Although the C–O bond of 4-O-5 had high bond energy, 41.2% of conversion was occurred in 60 min. The introduction of CaO could regulate the acidity of H-ZSM-5 to enhance the ability to break C–O bonds. Moreover, the possible pathways of C–O ether bonds in three lignin model compounds cleavage were proposed in order to selectively obtain target products from the raw lignin degradation. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13065-019-0557-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.