Photocatalytic Conversion of Methane and Reduction of CO2 with H2O PDF Download

Author: Xiang Yu
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Photocatalysis is one of the key technologies for clean energy and environmental applications. The number of applications based on photocatalysis has increased dramatically for the past two decades. Photocatalytic activation of C-H bonds is an emerging field. Methane is a promising source of energy with a huge reserve and is considered to be one of the alternatives to non-renewable petroleum resources because it can be converted to valuable hydrocarbon feedstocks and hydrogen through appropriate reactions. However, due to its high stability, high energy is usually consumed for its conversion, which remains a problem to be solved. Methane conversion and reaction mechanism occurring on metal-heteropolyacid-titania nanocomposites were investigated in Chapters 3 and 4. Oxidation of methane has been carried out for more than a century. Since oxygen is a very reactive molecule, methane can react very rapidly with molecular oxygen and is prone to total oxidation till CO2. Therefore, it is difficult to obtain a desired product with high yield and high selectivity. We report here direct and selective photocatalytic highly-selective oxidation of methane to carbon monoxide under ambient conditions. The composite catalysts on the basis of zinc, tungstophosphoric acid and titania exhibit exceptional performance in this reaction, high carbon monoxide selectivity and quantum efficiency of 7.1% at 362 nm. The reaction is consistent with the Mars-Van Krevelen type sequence and involves formation of the surface methoxy-carbonates as intermediates and zinc oxidation-reduction cycling. In the past few decades, extensive research has focused on the direct conversion of methane to alcohols or higher hydrocarbons. The current processes of converting methane to alcohols or olefins are complex and expensive, because they require an intermediate step of reforming methane to syngas. Although the direct conversion of methane to more valuable products has significant environmental and potential commercial value, there is no commercial scale process available. We uncovered highly selective (>90%) quantitative photochemical direct conversion of methane to ethane at ambient temperature over silver-heteropolyacid-titania nanocomposites. The ethane yield from methane reaches 9 % on the optimized materials. High quantum efficiency, high selectivity and significant yield of ethane combined with excellent stability are major advantages of methane quantitative synthesis from methane using the photochemical looping approach. The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the depletion of fossil fuel reserves have raised serious concerns about the subsequent impact of CO2 on the global climate and future energy supply. The use of abundant solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into fuel, such as carbon monoxide, methane or methanol, solves both problems simultaneously and provides a convenient method of energy storage. Chapter 5 addresses a new efficient catalyst for selective CO2 to CO conversion. The zinc containing phosphotungstic acid-titania nanocomposites exhibited exceptional high activity reaching 50 μmol CO/g·h and selectivity (73%) in the CO2 photocatalytic reduction to CO in the presence of water. The in-situ IR experiments suggest that reaction involves zinc bicarbonates containing hydroxyl groups. The decomposition of these zinc bicarbonate species under irradiation leads to the selective production of carbon monoxide and oxygen. In photocatalytic reactions, the difference in catalyst morphology usually has a significant effect on the photocatalytic performance. Chapter 6 studied the effect of monoclinic bismuth vanadate (BiVO4) crystals with controlled ratio of {010} and {110} facets for photocatalytic reduction of CO2 by H2O. The reaction under irradiation is significantly enhanced by selective photo-deposition of Cu and Co co-catalysts over different facets providing Z-scheme charge flow.