Direct Measurement of Zeolite Brønsted Acidity by FTIR Spectroscopy: Solid-State 1H MAS NMR Approach for Reliable Determination of the Integrated Molar Absorption Coefficients

Abstract

Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy is broadly applied nowadays for probing the concentration and strength of acid sites in zeolite catalysts. Accuracy of direct determination of the quantity of different hydroxyl groups by FTIR method suffers from uncertainty of the integrated molar absorption coefficients, e. The values of e reported by different authors might differ by an order of magnitude. This paper provides an approach for reliable determination of the integrated molar absorption coefficients by combining 1H magic-angle spinning (MAS) NMR and FTIR spectroscopy techniques. The concentration of Bronsted acid sites for the series of H-ZSM-5 and H-ZSM-23 zeolite samples with different Si/Al ratio has been reliably established with 1H MAS NMR using methane and benzene as internal standards adsorbed on the studied samples. The data on the obtained concentration were further used to analyze same zeolite samples with FTIR spectroscopy and derive the information on the values of the integrated mo...