Promoting propane dehydrogenation performance of Co/ silicalite-1 catalysts

Co catalysts supported on silicalite-1 (S-1) zeolite are developed in this work for direct propane dehydrogenation to propylene (PDH), showing excellent activity and propylene selectivity. Comprehensive characterizations of XRD, SEM, N2-sorption, TEM, DR UV-vis, H2-TPR, and TGA jointly evidence that the atomic-level dispersed CoOx species have significantly positive influence on the catalytic performance for PDH reaction. Alkaline treatment is a kind of advanced and effective method to create a number of defects on S-1 support, further isolating CoOx species and thus depressing side reactions. After the optimizing treatment on support, the catalyst with 0.5 wt% of Co supported on the S-1 pretreated with 0.1 mol/L of NaOH solution can exhibit simultaneously 78 % of propane conversion and 97 % of propylene selectivity after 15-minute of induction period. This work confirms that the highly-dispersed CoOx species bonded to zeolite are necessary for obtaining highly active and selective Co sites confined in the developed oxygen defects for the PDH reaction possibly due to the interface-induced effect between Co-O, and the main deactivation cause is ascribed to the migration and aggregation of Co sites in defects which points out that the direction for developing commercial Co based catalysts should focus on the stability design of active single Co atoms.