Alumina supported Palladium materials are well-known commercial catalysts for selective hydrogenation of acetylene in ethylene for the multi-billion polyethylene industry. Recently, ceria has been demonstrated to show high selectivity and considerable activity for selective hydrogenation at high temperatures. The objective of this investigation is to develop ceria based Pd catalysts with high activity and high selectivity for the selective hydrogenation of acetylene in ethylene even at lower temperatures. The approach is to combine Pd with ceria into one catalyst system using the co-precipitation technique followed by post treatment procedures, such as calcination, reduction, etc. Pd-ceria catalysts with Pd loadings of 0.1-2% have been synthesized and studied for reactions at the various temperatures, from 50°C, to 200°C, with various reduction conditions, such as 1 hour at 200°C or without any reduction. From the results, we can see the catalysts produced maximum ethylene yield at the relatively higher temperatures. For the reactions with the reduction procedure, the calcined samples showed better conversion, and selectivity. However, for the reactions without reduction procedure, the uncalcined showed better behaviors than the calcined samples. Also, by performing the stability tests, we could see that both calcined and uncalcined catalysts are stable even with no prior reduction. Temperature programmed reduction, hydrogen chemisorption, Thermogravimetric Analysis and in-situ FTIR will be used to characterize the fresh and used catalysts and to relate them to the reaction performance of catalysts with various pre-post treatment procedures.

Development of novel Pd-ceria catalyst system for selective hydrogenation of acetylen

255th National Meeting (2018)

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