Adsorption catalytic cycle

The next stage in the catalytic cycle is adsorption of the reactants onto the catalyst surface. There are two types of adsorption process ... 

We can think of a heterogeneous catalyst as a collection of active sites (denoted by ) located at a surface. The total number of sites is constant and equal to N (if there is any chance of confusion with N atoms, we will use the symbol N ). The adsorption of the reactant is formally a reaction with an empty site to give an intermediate I (or more conveniently R if we explicitly want to express that it is the reactant R sitting on an adsorption site). All sites are equivalent and each can be occupied by a single species only. We will use the symbol 6r to indicate the fraction of occupied sites occupied by species R, making N6r the number of occupied sites. Hence, the fraction of unoccupied sites available for reaction will be 1 - 0r The following equations represent the catalytic cycle of Fig. 2.7 ... 

In drafting a catalytic cycle as in Eqs. (132)-(135) we naturally have to ensure that the reaction steps are thermodynamically and stoichiometrically consistent. For instance, the number of sites consumed in the adsorption and dissociation steps must be equal to the number of sites liberated in the formation and desorption steps, to fulfill the criterion that a catalyst is unaltered by the catalytic cycle. 

The opposite of adsorption, desorption, represents the end of the catalytic cycle. It is also the basis of temperature-programmed desorption (TPD), an important method of studying the heats of adsorption and reactions on a surface, so that the activation... 

Desorption is important both because it represents the last step in a catalytic cycle and because it is also the basis of temperature-programmed desorption (TPD), a powerful tool used to investigate the adsorption, decomposition and reaction of species on surfaces. This method is also called thermal desorption spectroscopy (TDS), or sometimes temperature programmed reaction spectroscopy, TPRS (although strictly speaking the method has nothing to do with spectroscopy). 

It is most convenient to explain catalysis using an example. We have chosen a hydrogenation catalysed by nickel in the metallic state. According to the schematic of Fig. 3.1 the first step in the actual catalysis is adsorption . It is useful to distinguish physisorption and chemisorption . In the former case weak, physical forces and in the latter case relatively strong, chemical forces play a role. When the molecules adsorb at an active site physisorption or chemisorption can occur. In catalysis often physisorption followed by chemisorption is the start of the catalytic cycle. This can be understood from Fig. 3.2, which illustrates the adsorption of hydrogen on a nickel surface. 

In the foregoing it has been discus.sed how a metal can dissociate H2. Fig. 3.6 explains the principle of catalysis with an example of the hydrogenation of ethylene, for which dissociative chemisorption of hydrogen is an elementary step in the catalytic cycle. The adsorption of alkenes, on the other hand, is non-dissociative. 

It is concluded that the occupation of the step and kink sites plays a crucial role in the promotion of the Pt catalyst. The cyclic voltammetry results can be used to explain the conversion trends observed in Figure 2. For unpromoted 5%Pt/C the Pt step and kink sites are unoccupied and available for adsorption of reactant and oxidant species. During reaction these sites facilitate premature catalyst deactivation due to poisoning by strongly adsorbed by-products (5) and (or) the formation of a surface oxide layer (6). The 5%Pt,0.5%Bi/C catalyst has a portion of these Pt step and kink sites occupied and the result is a partial reduction in the catalyst deactivation and a consequent increase in alcohol conversion. As the Bi level is increased to lwt.% almost all of the Pt step and kink sites are occupied and the result is a catalyst with high activity. As more Bi is introduced onto the catalyst surface a bulk Bi phase is formed. Since the catalyst activity is maintained it is speculated that the bulk Bi phase is not involved in the catalytic cycle. 

Gomez-Sainero et al. (11) reported X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy results on their Pd/C catalysts prepared by an incipient wetness method. XPS showed that Pd° (metallic) and Pdn+ (electron-deficient) species are present on the catalyst surface and the properties depend on the reduction temperature and nature of the palladium precursor. With this understanding of the dual sites nature of Pd, it is believed that organic species S and A are chemisorbed on to Pdn+ (SI) and H2 is chemisorbed dissociatively on to Pd°(S2) in a noncompetitive manner. In the catalytic cycle, quasi-equilibrium ( ) was assumed for adsorption of reactants, SM and hydrogen in liquid phase and the product A (12). Applying Horiuti s concept of rate determining step (13,14), the surface reaction between the adsorbed SM on site SI and adsorbed hydrogen on S2 is the key step in the rate equation. 

One of the most efficient approaches allowing us to investigate in a reasonable time a catalytic cycle on non-periodic materials in combination with reliable DFT functional is a cluster approach. The present study is devoted to the investigation of the effect of the cluster size on the energetic properties of the (p-oxo)(p-hydroxo)di-iron metal active site. As a first step, we have studied the stability of the [Fen(p-0)(p-0H)Fen]+ depending on the A1 position and cluster size. Then, we compared the energetics for the routes involving the first two elementary steps of the N20 decomposition catalytic process i.e. the adsorption and dissociation of one N20 molecule. 

Figure 1.1 Schematic representation of a well known catalytic reaction, the oxidation of carbon monoxide on noble metal catalysts CO + Vi 02 —> C02. The catalytic cycle begins with the associative adsorption of CO and the dissociative adsorption of 02 on the surface. As adsorption is always exothermic, the potential energy decreases. Next CO and O combine to form an adsorbed C02 molecule, which represents the rate-determining step in the catalytic sequence. The adsorbed C02 molecule desorbs almost instantaneously, thereby liberating adsorption sites that are available for the following reaction cycle. This regeneration of sites distinguishes catalytic from stoichiometric reactions.

In every gas/solid catalytic cycle, at least one of the reactants must at some point be adsorbed on the catalyst surface. Let us consider the reaction A + B —> C. There are two options (Figure 4.2) In the first, both reactants A and B are first adsorbed on the catalyst, migrate to each other, and react on the surface, giving the product C, which is desorbed into the gas phase. This pathway, which we have already met in Chapter 2, is the Langmuir-Hinshelwood mechanism. The other option is that A is adsorbed on the catalyst surface, and B subsequently reacts with it from the gas phase to give C (the so-called Eley-Rideal mechanism [22]). The Langmuir-Hinshelwood mechanism is much more common, partly because many reactants are activated by the adsorption on the catalyst surface. 

After diffusion towards and adsorption on the surface-active sites, the reactants are converted to products. Those products then desorb and diffuse out of the catalyst, leaving the active centers available for new incoming reactants. That way, the catalytic cycle can be repeated many times on each active site. For this to work, however, the bond strength between the adsorbed siuface species and the active sites... 

The next step in a catalytic cycle after adsorption of the reactant molecules is a surface reaction, the simplest of which is the unimolecular conversion of an adsorbed species into a product molecule. For example, the following two-step sequence represents the conversion of A into products through the irreversible surface reaction of A ... 

One way to explain the observed reaction orders is to also allow for a noncompetitive dihydrogen adsorption step in the sequence. This added complexity makes sense because more surface sites are available to dihydrogen than ethylene because of the very small size of a H2 molecule. The catalytic cycle for ethylene... 

The three seminal ideas in this early work of Temkin are quite general. The first is that adsorption of nitrogen is rate determining. The second is the virtual pressure or fugacity of adsorbed nitrogen, a concept of great importance to the understanding of catalytic cycles at the steady state. The third idea is the kinetic description of the catalytic surface as a nonuniform one. The last was systematized later by Temkin s school, both in theory and in application, to a... 

Reactor control models for monoliths require a more detailed study of the time scales of all occurring subprocesses, because of their dynamic character. Under dynamic circumstances, the rates of the individual elementary steps of a catalytic cycle, such as adsorption, surface reaction, and desorption, are not equal to each other anymore, since the time scales of the corresponding processes may differ by many orders of magnitude. Therefore, accumulation effects on the catalyst surface have to be taken into account as well, which demands that continuity equations for surface species be included in the model. Such aspects may even play a role in the steady state if the kinetics depend on rate-determining steps that change according to the concentration level of the reactants... 

---