BORON NITRIDE BASED CATALYSTS FOR PROPANE ACTIVATION

Date

2025-7-2

Author

Karaeyvaz, Mukaddes Candan

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Catalytic propane activation is a difficult task as the selectivity control and activity enhancement are still important challenges that need to be addressed. Commercial propane dehydrogenation (PDH) catalysts, however, face various issues, including toxicity, high cost, instability, and low selectivity. Herein, hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) was chosen as a support and as a catalyst for propane activation. The first part of this study focused on examining the effect of exfoliation on the properties of h-BN and propane activation performance. h-BN was subjected to liquid nitrogen-assisted gas exfoliation to engineer the nature of active sites. The exfoliated material yield was obtained as 13%, with no significant dependence on the thermal treatment temperature. Upon gas-exfoliation, the surface characteristics of h-BN were changed, resulting in the C-C bond breakage and over-oxidation to CO2. The exfoliated catalysts demonstrated performance in propane oxidation, achieving 90% CO2 selectivity at 520°C. The second part of this study focused on utilizing h-BN as a catalyst support for Zn incorporation. Supported Zn catalysts suffer from instability and dispersion problems in the literature. To address these issues, h-BN was chosen as a catalyst support. Zn incorporation was performed by atomic layer deposition (ALD). 1cy-Zn/hBN was shown to exhibit remarkable dispersion, with the majority of Zn species being in single-site form. As the cycle number was increased, the formation of ZnO nanoparticles was observed. The best catalytic activity was observed over 5cy-Zn/hBN with 96% propylene selectivity at 10.7% propane conversion with an initial TOF value of 11 h-1 at 550°C.

Subject Keywords

Hexagonal boron nitride, Exfoliation, Propane activation, Dehydrogenation, Zinc, Atomic layer deposition

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115450

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis