This tutorial review highlights representative examples of ionic liquid (IL)-based (bio)catalytic systems integrating reaction and separation, as a tool for the development of sustainable chemical processes (e.g. IL/scCO2 biphasic reactors, membrane reactors, nanodrop systems, microfluidic devices, supported IL phases, sponge-like ILs, etc.).
The enzymatic synthesis of panthenyl monoacyl esters was carried out by the direct esterification of fatty acids (e.g. lauric acid) with panthenol in sponge-like ionic liquids, as well as in deep eutectic mixtures, resulting in highly selective processes (i.e. near to 100% for the panthenyl monolaurate case).
The
biocatalytic synthesis of 16 flavor esters was carried out
by the direct esterification of aliphatic acids (e.g., acetic, propionic,
etc.) with an alcohol (e.g., cinnamyl alcohol, benzyl alcohol, anisyl
alcohol, rac-1-phenylethanol, or rac-sulcatol) using hydrophobic ionic liquids (ILs) based on ammonium
or imidazolium cations containing a long alkyl side chain (e.g., hexadecyltrimethylammonium
bistriflimide, [C16tma][NTf2]) as the reaction
medium. As temperature-switchable liquid/solid phases, these ILs behave
as spongelike systems (so-called spongelike ionic liquids (SLILs)),
which act as excellent monophasic reaction media for the lipase-catalyzed
synthesis of flavor esters. Under appropriate selected reaction conditions
(e.g., enzyme, substrate molar ratio, nature of the SLIL, etc.), product
yields near 100% were obtained for all of the synthesized flavor esters.
Because of the unique spongelike properties of these ILs, a separation
protocol based on the centrifugation of the solid IL/flavor ester
through nylon membranes was successfully used. By means of this approach,
the clean separation of all flavor products from the solid reaction
media was easily achieved, while the recovered SLIL/biocatalyst system
was reused for six consecutive operation cycles with unchanged catalytic
performance.
A sustainable chemo-enzymatic process for producing both glycerol carbonate acrylate (GCA) and glycerol carbonate methacrylate (GCMA), as useful monomers for preparation of biodegradable plastic materials, has been carried out taking...
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