Overcoming the Engineering Constraints for Scaling-Up the State-of-the-Art Catalyst for Tail-Gas N₂O Decomposition

Abstract

An efficient process is reported for preparing a state-of-the-art Fe-ferrierite catalyst for N 2 O decomposition under industrial tail-gas conditions. In the synthesis procedure we evaluate the very demanding constraints for scale-up; i.e. large reactor volumes are typically needed, long processing times and considerable amounts of waste water is generated. The proposed synthesis minimizes the amount of water used, and therefore the amount produced waste water is minimal; in this approach there is no liquid residual water stream that would need intensive processing. This has remarkable benefits in terms of process design, since the volume of equipment is reduced and the energy-intensive filtration is eliminated. This route exemplifies the concept of process intensification, with the ambition to re-engineer an existing process to make the industrial catalyst manufacture more sustainable. The so-obtained catalyst is active, selective and very stable under tail gas conditions containing H2O, NO and O2, together with N2O; keeping a high conversion during 70 h time on stream at 700 K, with a decay of 0.01%/h, while the standard reference catalyst decays at 0.06%/h; hence it deactivates six times slower, with ~5% absolute points of higher conversion. The excellent catalytic performance is preliminary ascribed to the differential speciation.

Two-Stage Catalytic Abatement of N2O Emission in Nitric Acid Plants

“…However, a vast majority of these findings refer only to the laboratory activity tests (for milligram amount of the catalyst) under model conditions and over a fine-grained catalyst (powder fraction). Only in a few scientific papers, the application aspect is considered, i.e., the topic of scaling-up the catalyst manufacturing process and industrial application [5,[20][21][22][23][24].…”

The influence of NOx presence on the catalytic N2O decomposition over the supported double-promoted cobalt spinel catalyst

“…In studies of removing nitrous oxide (I) from tail gases, numerous catalytic systems were investigated (Kapteijn et al 1996). Generally, they can be categorized into three groups: modified zeolites (Cheng et al 2012;Hussain et al 2012;Zhang et al 2012;Melian-Cabrera et al 2018), supported catalyst (Shen et al 2009;Karaskova et al 2012; Rico-Pérez and Bueno-López 2014) and modified oxide catalysts (Pasha et al 2009;Karásková et al 2010;Zabilskiy et al 2015).…”

Influence of co-fed gases (O2, CO2, CH4, and H2O) on the N2O decomposition over (Co, Fe)-ZSM-5 and (Co, Fe)-BETA catalysts

“…shows that the development of effective methods to reduce these emissions is therefore urgent. Consequently, extensive efforts are focused on catalysts for the decomposition of N 2 O into harmless N 2 and O 2 due to their efficiency, simplicity and low preparation costs [4,5]. N 2 O decomposition has been evaluated on several catalysts, such as supported noble metals [6][7][8], transition metal oxides [8][9][10][11][12], and metal exchanged zeolites [13][14][15].…”