Applications of Heterogeneous Catalysts in Green Chemistry

Abstract

In our day-to-day lives, the utilization of industrial products, including chemicals and fuels, is essential. The vast majority of these products are manufactured in chemical plants that transform raw materials into products that are suitable for the market based on the requirements of local and international regulatory authorities [1,2,3,4]. A chemical plant, in general, consists of many reactors and separator units, which are essential for the purification of the feed, its chemical conversion into the desired products and the subsequent purification of the products [5,6,7]. Each unit of a chemical plant is carefully designed and optimized to achieve a certain level of conversion and separation efficiency that eventually determines the volume and purity of the final products and plays a crucial role in bringing them to the market [5,8,9]. The efficiency of the entire chemical plant helps with minimizing the production cost and maintaining a competitive advantage in the market [5,7,10,11,12]. However, based on the process selected, the units of chemical plants may generate harmful emissions, such as liquid discharge, gases and particulate matter, that need to be controlled or treated before being released into the environment to avoid severe consequences [13,14,15,16]. Green chemistry [17,18,19,20,21] has emerged as an alternative strategy for producing chemicals in a more environmentally friendly and sustainable manner, as the environmentally harmful chemicals are replaced by more benign ones [22,23,24,25,26,27].