Search

Direct Hydroxylation of benzene to phenol with high yield and selectivity has been the goal of phenol industrial production. Photocatalysis can serve as a competitive method to realize the hydroxylation of benzene to phenol owing to its cost‐effective and environmental friendliness, however it is still a forbidding challenge to obtain good yield, high selectivity and high atom availability meanwhile. Here we show a series of supramolecular catalysts based on alkoxohexavanadate anions and quinolinium ions for the photocatalytic hydroxylation of benzene to phenol under UV irradiation. We demonstrate that polyoxoalkoxovanadates can serve as efficient catalysts which can not only stabilize quinolinium radicals but also reuse H2O2 produced by quinolinium ions under light irradiation to obtain excellent synergistic effect, including competitive good yield (50.1 %), high selectivity (>99 %) and high atom availability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: hydroxylation of benzene; polyoxovanadates; quinolinium; supramolecular photocatalysis; synergistic catalysis EN hydroxylation of benzene polyoxovanadates quinolinium supramolecular photocatalysis synergistic catalysis 14218 14219 2 06/18/21 20210621 NES 210621 A reader of this Research Article raised concerns regarding the isolated yield of phenol, the mass conservation of the catalytic system, the calculation of selectivity and the overoxidation of phenol, and the change of phenol yield with reaction time. As can be seen in Figure 2 of this Corrigendum, up to 12 h of reaction time, the conversion of benzene and the yield of phenol match well, and thus the phenol selectivity can be determined by analysis of the liquid phase. For the third repeated experiment, the GC-MS trace (Figure S3) showed that the residual benzene was 50.9 %, indicating a benzene conversion of 49.1 %, which was exactly identical to the yield of phenol of 49.1 %, implying again that the mass balance was fulfilled in our catalytic system. [Extracted from the article]