Preparation of NiCu Alloy Catalyst for the Hydrodeoxygenation of Benzofuran

Abstract

A series of bimetallic NixCu(10-x)/SiO2 (where x is the mass fraction of Ni and the total metal loading was fixed at 10 wt%.) catalysts with different Ni/Cu mass ratio are prepared and characterized by X-Ray diffraction (XRD), N2 adsorption-desorption, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), H2 temperature-programmed reduction (H2-TPR) and transmission electron microscope (TEM). The benzofuran (BF) hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) performance of as-prepared catalysts are evaluated in a fixed flow reactor. The results showed that the incorporation of Cu to Ni/SiO2 catalyst can increase surface area of catalyst and improve the reducibility of nickel oxide species, which contributed to higher catalytic activity and total deoxygenated compounds yield. Moreover, the strong synergistic effect between Ni and Cu led to the formation of NiCu alloy at the Ni mass fraction of 5 wt% and thus induced smaller crystallite size and exposure of more active particles, which inevitably contributed to the improved HDO performance for Ni5Cu5/SiO2 catalyst. At 300 °C, 3.0 MPa, MHSV=3.0 h−1 and H2/oil = 500(v/v), the total yield of deoxygenated products over Ni5Cu5/SiO2 catalyst reached 86.0%, which is increased by 10.8% and 77.4% as compared to those of monometallic Ni/SiO2 (75.2%) and Cu/SiO2 catalysts (8.8%), respectively. Finally, a possible reaction network for HDO of BF on Ni5Cu5/SiO2 catalyst was proposed.