Catalytic Oxidation of CO—A Striking Example of Synergetics

The dynamics of coupled catalyst wafers in a tube reactor was studied and traced by examining the oxidation of CO on a supported palladium zeolite catalyst under normal pressure in a continuous flow of reactants. An X-type zeolite loaded with 0.05% by weight palladium was used as catalyst. The overall conversion rate exhibits a dynamic behavior with self-affine patterns of excursions to smaller conversion rates on a time scale in the order of some seconds. Similar patterns were observed for the temperature time series of the catalyst wafers. The influence of the flow rate on catalyst wafer coupling was studied. Increasing the flow rate causes decoupling of the catalyst wafers, increased frequency of maximum excursions, increasing rate of smaller excursions, increasing pattern complexity and a decrease in maximum conversion (baseline).