Glycerol is, as the buildings block of all vegetable and animal fats and oils, an attractive educt due to enormous economic aspects. In fact, glycerol is the main by-product of the oleochemistry. Due to the increasing production of biofuels, the supply on glycerol is also increasing but at nearly constant remaining demand. Consequently, this imbalance between supply and demand, this oversupply on glycerol, leads to the decrease of its economic value. Research is being carried out in order find new outlets for this high functionalised molecule. An important potential for the revalorisation of glycerol shows its heterogeneously catalysed chemoselective oxidation with molecular oxygen. In fact, by this way, important products as glyceric acid or dihydroxyacetone can be produced. These products are still being produced by either stochiometric or enzymatic oxidation processes. Thus, the heterogeneously catalysed glycerol oxidation is an environmentally friendly alternative to the actual conventional processes to increase the economic value of the waste product of the biotechnology by producing interesting products from an industrial point of view. In this thesis, it could be shown that supported gold catalysts, particularly carbon supported gold catalysts, are highly active in the glycerol oxidation so that the reaction can be performed under atmospheric pressure. An important consequence from this result is that the reaction can herewith been performed under pH controlled conditions, which is relevant for mechanistical reasons. Moreover, a challenge due to the complex reaction network of glycerol oxidation is to control not only the activity but also the selectivity to the desired product. The study of, amongst others, the structure sensitivity and the promoter influence on the catalytic performance showed that the selectivity can be controlled. Furthermore, the kinetic investigation as well as the reaction modelling revealed important results concerning the reaction mechanism.