statistical optimization of liquid phase oxidation of benzyl alcohol over efficient cobalt promoted vanadyl pyrophosphate catalysts by box-behnken design

vanadium phosphorus oxides (vpo) has been applied as a heterogeneous catalyst in gas phase oxidation reactions and its application is very limited in liquid phase. in this study a series of cobalt-doped vanadium phosphorus oxides (vpo-co) catalysts with different loading of co (0.01-1.0 mol ratio of co/v) were prepared. oxidation of benzyl alcohol was studied in the liquid phase over vpo and vpo-co catalysts, using tert-butylhydroperoxide (tbhp) as an oxidant. these samples were characterized by xrd, sem and fouriertransform infrared (ft-ir) techniques. the optimal design of experiments using box-behnken method was employed to evaluate the effects of individual process variables (+1, 0, ­1, levels) such as, reaction temperature (30, 60 and 90 °c), reaction time (30, 255 and 480 min) and molar ratio of co/v (0, 0.5 and 1) and their optimum values were found to be 89.86 °c, 477.8 min and 0.64 molar ratio co/v, respectively, to achieve a conversion of 65.44%.