Catalyst For Complete Oxidation of Nitrogen Containing Samples

High temperature catalytic oxidation of nitrogen containing compounds has great importance for the analysis of environmental and industrial samples and the control of emissions of waste incineration facilities.The complete oxidation of nitrogen in different functional groups to NO and NO2is a crucial step for the determination of nitrogen in samples and NOxabatement[1,2]. Altough platinum group metals have excellent oxidation activity, they are expensive and easily poisoned by the presence of S, Cl and P containing organic substances. Therefore, there is a great interest to develop new active, selective and resistant catalyst to treat waste oxidation gases. In this study, the activities of CuO/ Al2O3, CuO-CeO2/ Al2O3and Pt/ Al2O3catalysts for total oxidation of nitrogen containing compounds were analyzed. The catalyst samples were prepared to obtain a loading of 10% Cu, 3%Cu-7%Ce, 1% Pt over the Al2O3as a suppport by impregnation method. Characterization of the catalyst samples was performed by X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) and BET. EDTA, urea, potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, thiourea, pyridine, glycine, yeast extract, metylaminewere selected as model components representing various nitrogen containing functional groups. The experiments were performed in a quartz tubular reactor in two zone furnace and the sample first oxidized at 700-850 oC under air flow of 200 ml/min and the cataytic oxidation was performed at 500oC in second zone, gas stream passed over catalytic bed. The catalytic activities of the samples were investigated with mass spectrometry by analyzing combustion products. In table 1, BET surface area values of the catalysts samples are given. It is seen that the surface area changes significantly when impregnating cerium and copper on Al2O3