Chemical and Technical Aspects of Propene Oxide Production via Hydrogen Peroxide (HPPO Process)

Propene oxide is a very important chemical whose production technology has changed a lot during the last 30 years. Nowadays, the most promising technology is the HPPO process in which the propene oxide is produced by oxidizing propene with hydrogen peroxide, via titanium silicalite-1 (TS-1) catalysis. Even if this technology has been patented in the early 1980s and some chemical plants are already in production, only few papers have been published until now dealing with the catalytic and kinetic aspects of the process. In this paper, the state of the art of the scientific knowledge and technical aspects related to propene oxide synthesis in the presence of TS-1 catalyst have been reviewed.