A Brønsted solid acid synthesized from fly ash for vapor phase dehydration of methanol

A solid acid was prepared from the coal fly ash by acid treatment. The prepared solid acid was characterized by XRD, FT-IR, solid-state NMR and SEM. The characterization results shows that the solid acid contains two types of Brønsted acid sites: weak acidic -OH groups and strong bridging Si-O(H)-Al groups. Our results indicate that fly ash solid acid is a low cost, effective and stable catalyst that are highly suited to produce DME by dehydration reaction.