Ethylene 83,98 Hydrogen adsorption

In connection with ethylene hydrogenation, adsorption of hydrogen on alumina has also been studied by the TPD technique. Some of the... 

We consider first some experimental observations. In general, the initial heats of adsorption on metals tend to follow a common pattern, similar for such common adsorbates as hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and ethylene. The usual order of decreasing Q values is Ta > W > Cr > Fe > Ni > Rh > Cu > Au a traditional illustration may be found in Refs. 81, 84, and 165. It appears, first, that transition metals are the most active ones in chemisorption and, second, that the activity correlates with the percent of d character in the metallic bond. What appears to be involved is the ability of a metal to use d orbitals in forming an adsorption bond. An old but still illustrative example is shown in Fig. XVIII-17, for the case of ethylene hydrogenation. 

At least for ethylene hydrogenation, catalysis appears to be simpler over oxides than over metals. Even if we were to assume that Eqs. (1) and (2) told the whole story, this would be true. In these terms over oxides the hydrocarbon surface species in the addition of deuterium to ethylene would be limited to C2H4 and C2H4D, whereas over metals a multiplicity of species of the form CzH D and CsHs-jD, would be expected. Adsorption (18) and IR studies (19) reveal that even with ethylene alone, metals are complex. When a metal surface is exposed to ethylene, selfhydrogenation and dimerization occur. These are surface reactions, not catalysis in other words, the extent of these reactions is determined by the amount of surface available as a reactant. The over-all result is that a metal surface exposed to an olefin forms a variety of carbonaceous species of variable stoichiometry. The presence of this variety of relatively inert species confounds attempts to use physical techniques such as IR to char-... 

Fig. 4. Activity versus water adsorption , hydrogen adsorption sequence O, ethylene adsorption sequence.

Over zinc oxide it is clear that only a limited number of sites are capable of type I hydrogen adsorption. This adsorption on a Zn—O pair site is rapid with a half-time of less than 1 min hence, it is fast enough so that H2-D2 equilibration (half-time 8 min) can readily occur via type I adsorption. If the active sites were clustered, one might expect the reaction of ethylene with H2-D2 mixtures to yield results similar to those obtained for the corresponding reaction with butyne-2 over palladium That is, despite the clean dideutero addition of deuterium to ethylene, the eth-... 

Nickel films completely covered with oxygen will not adsorb hydrogen when exposed to this gas immediately after oxidation, but will regain their ability to adsorb hydrogen after several hours. Hydrogen thus adsorbed is not able to hydrogenate ethylene. Heats of adsorption measurements of this type of hydrogen adsorption have not been made. 

We see in these formulae that the kinetically measured velocity constant has only in one special case, namely, in the case of zero order, the meaning of a real velocity constant. In all the other cases, it contains implicit adsorption coefficients, e.g., in the form kb = const., or (in retarded reactions) kb/b = const. Only in the case of broken order is it possible to determine k and b separately from kinetic measurements, as e.g., Schwab and Zorn (5) did for the ethylene hydrogenation. 

It should be noted that the correlations being discussed here are far from perfect and exceptions can be found in nearly each of the reaction series. (For the ethylene-hydrogen and deuterium-ammonia reactions, the correlation between catalytic activity and per cent d-character is nearly quantitative.) This is to be expected in view of the experimental difficulties involved in preparing clean and reproducible metal surfaces, particularly where different metals are being compared. In any attempt to correlate catalytic properties with work functions, it should also lie recognized that the work function is affected by adsorption, and therefore that the work functions of metals under catalytic conditions, or even their relative order, may be somewhat different than those of the clean metals. 

The co-existence of at least two modes of ethylene adsorption has been clearly demonstrated in studies of 14C-ethylene adsorption on nickel films [62] and various alumina- and silica-supported metals [53,63—65] at ambient temperature and above. When 14C-ethylene is adsorbed on to alumina-supported palladium, platinum, ruthenium, rhodium, nickel and iridium catalysts [63], it is observed that only a fraction of the initially adsorbed ethylene can be removed by molecular exchange with non-radioactive ethylene, by evacuation or during the subsequent hydrogenation of ethylene—hydrogen mixtures (Fig. 6). While the adsorptive capacity of the catalysts decreases in the order Ni > Rh > Ru > Ir > Pt > Pd, the percentage of the initially adsorbed ethylene retained by the surface which was the same for each of the processes, decreased in the order... 

The analogy between abnormally low CO and C2H4 adsorption, on the one hand, and low relative activity, on the other hand, that has been pointed out while discussing the ethylene hydrogenation hence occurs also for the benzene hydrogenation. Some further experiments on this reaction even show that the analogy is present in details. It has been discussed before that the inaccessibility to CO could not be observed when a catalyst such as 5421 is reduced at low temperatures but that it occurs only when the temperature of reduction is raised (Table II). The same can be said of the activity, as is shown in Fig. 31 the drop in activity is seen to occur at about the same temperature. The influence of surface inaccessibility on catalytic activity appears more pronounced than for adsorption. 

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