Sucrose Inversion – An Experiment on Heterogeneous Catalysis

• Author(s): Adélio Mendes ; Fernão D. Magalhães ; Luis M. Madeira
• Date: 2003
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10216/67603
• Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
• Subject(s): Ciências Tecnológicas; Tecnologia; Tecnologia química
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

llustration of heterogeneous catalysis concepts in laboratory courses is not usually simple or economical. For our undergraduate senior lab course we have developed an environmentally friendly experiment dealing with several aspects of heterogeneous catalysis, having in mind the use of readily available and relatively inexpensive equipment, and chemicals on a compact setup, which students can safely operate. The experiment deals with the acid-catalyzed sucrose inversion, performed in packed bed chemical reactors, where the catalyst is a cation-exchange resin in the H + form. An additional reactor is included for illustrating an enzyme-catalyzed system. The conversion achieved is determined using the Flow Injection Analysis technique.