Veratraldehyde is an important chemical
used in perfumery, agrochemical,
and pharmaceutical industries. Current processes of manufacture of
veratraldehyde use homogeneous catalysts, which make them highly polluting,
creating problems of disposal of effluents and product purity. In
the current work, veratraldehyde was synthesized from O-alkylation
of vanillin with an environmentally benign reagent, dimethyl carbonate.
A series of potassium loaded La2O3–MgO
were prepared by the incipient wetness impregnation method, and their
performance was evaluated vis-à-vis MgO, La2O3, La2O3–MgO, and a series of
1–4 wt % K/La2O3–MgO. All catalysts
were characterized by different techniques, such as N2 adsorption/desorption,
XRD, TGA-DSC, FT-IR, CO2-TPD, and SEM techniques. The effect
of different loadings (1–4 wt %) of potassium on La2O3–MgO was studied, among which 2 wt % K/La2O3–MgO showed the best activity and selectivity
due to high dispersion of potassium and high basicity in comparison
with the rest. The activity of 2 wt % K/La2O3–MgO in O-methylation of vanillin with dimethyl carbonate
(DMC) was closely associated with basicity. Various parameters were
studied to achieve the maximum yield of the desired product. The maximum
conversion was found with catalyst loading of 0.03 g/cm3 and mole ratio of vanillin and DMC of 1:15 at 160 °C in 2 h.
The reaction follows pseudo-first-order kinetics for the O-methylation
of vanillin. The energy of activation was found to be 13.5 kcal/mol.
Scale-up was done using the kinetic model to observe that the process
could be scaled up using the process parameters. The overall process
is clean and green.