Open Access

Jan Drönner, Karim Bijerch, Peter Hausoul, Regina Palkovits, Matthias Eisenacher

• Hydroxybenzene, commonly known as phenol, is one of the most important organic commodity chemicals. To produce phenol, the cumene process is the most used process worldwide. A crucial step in this process is the Hock rearrangement, which has a major impact on the overall cumene consumption rate and determines the safety level of the process. The most used catalyst for the cleavage of cumene hydroperoxide (CHP) is sulfuric acid. Besides its strong corrosive property, which increases plant investment costs, it also requires neutralization after the decomposition step to prevent side reactions. In this study, we show that high-temperature-treated Linde Type X (LTX) zeolites exhibit a high activity for the peroxide cleavage step. In addition, the structure–activity relationship responsible for this good performance in the reaction system of the HOCK rearrangement was investigated. XRPD analyses revealed the formation of a new phase after temperature treatment above 900 °C. The Si/Al ratio determined by EDX suggested the formation of extra-framework aluminum, which was confirmed by solid-state NMR analysis. The newly formed extra-framework aluminum was found to be responsible for the high catalytic activity. BET analyses showed that the surface area drops at higher calcination temperatures. This leads to a lower catalytic activity for most known reactions. However, for this study, no decrease in activity has been observed. The newfound material shows extraordinarily high activity as a catalyst in the HOCK cleavage and has the potential to be a heterogeneous alternative to sulfuric acid for this reaction.