Enhanced activity for gas phase propylene oxide rearrangement to allyl alcohol by Au promotion of Li3PO4 catalyst

In present paper, lithium phosphate (Li3PO4) promoted by nano-gold (denoted as Au/Li3PO4) was used in gas phase propylene oxide (PO) rearrangement to produce allyl alcohol (AA). It was found that the support of gold could improve the catalytic activity as compared with pure Li3PO4. Au/Li3PO4 with gold loading of 0.042 wt% showed higher catalytic performance. The enhancement might come from the increase of the strength and amount of strong basic sites after gold deposition. Results of XPS spectra and density functional theory (DFT) verified that the charge transfer from oxygen species to gold species led to the electron-rich gold species, which acted as stronger base sites.