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In this work, the role of Brønsted acid for furfural production in biomass pyrolysis on supported sulfates catalysts was investigated. The introduction of Brønsted acid was shown to improve the degradation of polysaccharides to intermediates for furfural, which did not work well when only Lewis acids were used in the process. Experimental results showed that CuSO 4 /HZSM-5 catalyst exhibited the best performance for furfural (28% yield), which was much higher than individual HZSM-5 (5%) and CuSO 4 (6%). The optimum reaction conditions called for the mass ratio of CuSO 4 /HZSM-5 to be 0.4 and the catalyst/biomass mass ratio to be 0.5. The recycled catalyst exhibited low productivity (9%). Analysis of the catalysts by Py-IR revealed that the CuSO 4 /HZSM-5 owned a stronger Brønsted acid intensity than HZSM-5 or the recycled CuSO 4 /HZSM-5. Therefore, the existence of Brønsted acid is necessary to achieve a more productive degradation of biomass for furfural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]