Hydrolysis of Oligosaccharides and Polysaccharides on Sulfonated Solid Acid Catalysts: Relations between Adsorption Properties and Catalytic Activities

[Image: see text] Sulfonated solid acid materials, such as sulfonated carbon catalysts, are promising materials as heterogeneous catalysts for the hydrolysis of esters and polysaccharides in water solvents. The catalytic active site is a sulfonic acid functional group. Compared to conventional strong acidic ion-exchange resin catalysts, sulfonated carbon materials have less sulfonic acid functional groups but higher catalytic activity for hydrolysis of polysaccharides per catalyst weight. However, the details of catalytic properties and the substrate suitability of both catalysts are unclear. In this study, the hydrolytic activities and the adsorption properties of both catalysts were investigated for various oligosaccharides and polysaccharides with varying degrees of polymerization (DP). The catalytic activities for the hydrolysis with increase of the DP of saccharides were found to increase over the sulfonated carbon catalyst but decrease over strong acidic ion-exchange resin catalyst. The inverse catalytic properties attribute to the dependence of the amounts of adsorption and/or penetration of saccharides on the DP. Moreover, the catalytic activity per acidic sites of strong acidic ion-exchange resin is in good agreement with the value obtained by multiplying the catalytic activity of a dilute sulfuric acid by the penetration degrees.