Manganese Promoted CO Hydrogenation Catalysts: A Study of Metal Promoter Interaction Effects

One of the biggest societal challenges nowadays is the quest for alternative fuels that can provide us sustainable energy, the catalytic conversion of syngas, a mixture of CO and H2, is capable of producing a various kinds of alternative fuels such as Ethanol and long chain hydrocarbons. The aim of my PhD work is to investigate the rational design of promoted metal catalysts for CO hydrogenation reactions. The use of promoters is ubiquitous in CO hydrogenation reactions to increase active metal’s activities as well as the selectivity towards desired products. The main body of my work focuses on the use of simple techniques and common elemental precursors to improve the interactions in between a promoter and active metal. One of the many ways of achieving this is through the use of Strong Electrostatic Adsorption (SEA). Special attention to the surface charging parameters of mixed oxide as a function of solution pH can create a driving force to selectively adsorb a precursor complex onto a single phase of a binary mixture. Although, the precise active site of promoters in reactions and how they interact with active metals to react the reactants require many more studies, it is agreed that a key design objective is to increase the metal-promoter interactions. This work demonstrates a procedure to achieve this with Mn promoted catalysts.