Fluorination of Methanol Catalysts to improve Productivity and Selectivity

In this work the oxidative fluorination of methanol catalysts is examined. A systematic variation of the compositions of the investigated oxidic ternary CZFe (copper, zinc, iron) catalyst systems led to a total of nine different catalyst systems. A subsequent oxidative fluorination of all systems showed a significant improvement in the methanol productivity and selectivity of almost all systems tested. Low-iron systems benefited most from oxidative fluorination. Furthermore, BET, TGA, IR, pXRD and SEM measurements showed that the properties of the CZFe systems (crystallinity, surface-area, high-temperature carbonate content) are very well tuneable. As shown in preliminary investigations, fluorination leads to an increase in the number of active centres for methanol synthesis and at the same time increases the activation energy for the rWGS reaction.