Due to the modern way of life, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing very quickly. Experts are looking for solutions to reduce its concentration. One of the solutions is its conversion to methanol. In doing so, catalysts are used in industry to accelerate certain chemical reactions to convert the reactant to the desired product. In the development of catalysts, various tests are performed to find the most active, specific and stable one for a particular reaction.
Some of the catalysts used in the synthesis of methanol are Cu/ZnO/Al2O3, Cu/SrTiO3 and Pd/In2O3 and they were tested at the Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana. I analyzed the test data and found out how the selectivity, activity and activation energy are affected by different deposition of copper nanoparticles on the SrTiO3 catalyst. I also compared these catalysts with Pd/In2O3 and Cu/ZnO/Al2O3.
The findings showed that the activities of catalysts with different copper deposition on SrTiO3 do not change in most cases depending on time, and the selectivities increase.
The apparent activation energies of methanol formation in catalysts with 0.5 and 5 % copper deposition on SrTiO3 are quite similar, almost identical. When comparing different types of catalysts, the results show that Pd/In2O3 has the highest apparent activation energy of methanol formation and Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 the lowest one.
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