Selective hydrogen combustion over Rh-Sn/Al2O3 catalysts during propane dehydrogenation

Abstract

A series of Rh-Sn/Al2O3 catalysts were prepared by 0.5 wt% of Rh and varied amounts of Sn from 0 to 3.0 wt%. Rh-Sn catalysts were evaluated to determine if selective hydrogen combustion(SHC) can be effectively applicable to propane dehydrogenation (PDH). PDH is an endothermic reaction and SHC can generate partial heat energy. In this study, two separate SHC reactions were examined. One was to look into the quantification of competitive combustion states over Rh-Sn catalysts in the presence of hydrogen, propylene, oxygen, and nitrogen. The other was to evaluate SHC with Rh-Sn catalysts in the presence of hydrogen, propane, oxygen, and nitrogen. The factor that we entitled A factor, was employed to analyze the effect of Sn amount. The result showed that the best performance was achieved by 0.5Rh-1.5Sn/Al2O3 catalyst for both SHC reactions. Characteristics of catalysts were analyzed by CO chemisorption, XPS, TEM-EDX and TPR.