Camphene is an industrial intermediate compound for commercial chemicals such as isoborneol, isobornyl acetate and camphor. Industrially, the conventional process for camphene production consists of the isomerization of alpha-pinene using acidic TiO2 as catalyst. The use of this catalyst presents problems such as considerable time for preparation, reproducibility and recovery of catalyst from products after the alpha-pinene isomerization. For the first time, a commercial exchange resin was used as catalyst for this reaction. Based on the concentration of product as a function of the reaction time, the path of the alpha-pinene transformation to camphene and byproducts is proposed. Temperature and alpha-pinene/catalyst ratio were studied in order to optimize the yield to camphene production. The obtained results were comparable with those reported for acidic TiO2.
Copyright 2003 Elsevier Ltd.