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Furfural is a renewable platform compound that can be derived from lignocellulosic biomass. The highly functionalized molecular structure of furfural enables us to prepare a variety of high value-added chemicals, which will help realize biomass high-value utilization, and alleviate energy and environmental problems. This paper reviews the research progress on furfural production and upgrading to C5 chemicals from the catalyst perspective. The emphasis is placed on summarizing and refining the catalytic mechanism and in-depth analysis of available data. Specifically, the reaction mechanism of furfural production and upgrading is summarized firstly from the perspective of reaction pathways and reaction kinetics. Then, the available data are further processed to evaluate the actual reaction efficiency of different catalytic systems from multiple dimensions. Finally, based on statistical analysis, the challenges and opportunities of furfural-based research are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Furfural is a 5‐membered heterocyclic compound derived from biomass and can be converted into various chemicals and biofuels through hydrogenation. Furfural conversion invariably requires the involvement of catalysts. The performance of these catalysts predominantly hinges on the characteristics of the metal active sites, the properties of the support, and the regulation of reaction conditions. Therefore, the selection of metals and supports, the preparation methods of catalysts, as well as the determination of reaction solvents, temperature, pressure, and catalyst dosage are the factors that researchers need to consider. Based on this, this present review focuses on the production process and heterogeneous catalytic system selection of furfural hydrogenation to prepare downstream products since 2018. It provides a brief introduction to the corresponding catalytic reaction mechanisms, focuses on the effects of different metals and supports on catalytic performance, and provides an outlook on this research direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biorefinery is an excellent strategy to deal with the energy crisis and environmental pollution in the new age. Based on biorefinery, low-value biomass resources can be converted into various value-added products. Furfural is one value-added platform chemical from biomass resources, which has important applications in energy, medicine, chemical, and other fields. The industrial production of furfural has come out for nearly one century and is relatively mature nowadays. However, there are still some issues remain to be solved in the industrial production. In order to solve these problems, efforts have been paid on exploring new technologies and progresses. In this paper, the characteristics of furfural were introduced firstly, and the present situation and problems of furfural industrial production technology are summarized, including corrosion of equipment caused by acid catalysts, difficulty in catalyst recycling, water pollution and so on. Then, the research status and problems of furfural preparation by hydrolysis and pyrolysis and the characteristic of the microwave-assisted technology were carefully reviewed. Finally, the future development direction of furfural preparation technology was prospected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]