Oxidation to Sodium Gluconate

In our laboratories, the conversion of glucose to gluconates catalysed by gold was discovered and the outstanding features of activity, selectivity and durability were highlighted [47]- 

The selectivity observed with palladium and platinum catalyst was less than 95% whereas with gold it was close to 100% at total conversion. 

Detailed work on optimization followed the first results, with the aim of proposing gold as an alternative process to the biochemical route. This led to a highly efficient catalytic system. The work also took advantage of the mechanistic studies discussed in Section 13.4. Starting from TOP of a few hundred h units, we reached the impressive value close to 60000h , which is similar to the behavior of enzymatic catalysis [16]. 

Catalyst QHijOe (moll ) Cat/Clucose (gkg ) pH Stirring (rpm) Temperature rq Specific activity (h- l Gluconate productivity (kgm- h- ) 

Owing to the outstanding properties of the gold catalysts, particular efforts were devoted to the comparison of gold catalysis with enzymatic catalysis under strictly similar conditions. 

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