Hydrophobic Modification of Sulfonated Carbon Aerogels from Coir Fibers To Enhance Their Catalytic Performance for Esterification

The hydrophilicity of sulfonic acid-functionalized solid catalysts tends to accelerate the deactivation of the catalyst for chemical reactions where water is produced during the process. In this work, we proposed a hydrophobic carbon aerogel acid catalyst derived from coir fibers by a sulfonation-hydrophobization route via the diazo reduction method. Sulfonation using the diazo reduction method offers some advantages such as the process takes only a few minutes and the modified surface can be easily modified further to be hydrophobic. The carbon aerogel was produced by direct pyrolysis of cellulose aerogels derived from coir fibers using an NH₄OH-urea method and then sulfonated and hydrophobized using sulfanilic acid and 4-tert-butylaniline (TBA), respectively. The carbon aerogel exhibited a very high surface area (2624.93-3911.05 m² g^-1), which provides a lot of number of sites for sulfonate groups (2.30-2.70 mmol g^-1). The water contact angle of the sulfonated catalyst after hydrophobization ranged from 70 to 115°, depending on the mass ratio of the TBA-to-solid catalyst. The hydrophobic catalyst exhibited better catalytic performance toward esterification of acetic acid with ethanol. A conversion of 65-74% could be achieved in a brief time using the hydrophobic catalyst. The conversions were much higher than that obtained by the unmodified hydrophilic catalyst. Our study offers a strategy to tune the surface hydrophobicity of the sulfonated solid acid catalyst to match for specific chemical reactions.