Cu-based catalysts for the conversion of acetylene and ethanol

Natural resources, such as land, water, or fossil fuels, are among the scarcest resources in the world. The scarcity of these resources is not only caused by their finiteness or the rise in population, but also because of not utilizing natural resources effectively. The usage of raw materials produced by renewable resources or by available local resources with the best effective production routes could be a solution for the scarcity of natural resources. With this vision, this work explores the conversion of acetylene and ethanol, two commodity chemicals, which could be synthesized by fossil or sustainable resources. 1,3-butadiene and acetaldehyde are the target products of these reactions, respectively. For the acetylene conversion reactions, a fully remote-controlled, automated flow reactor system was constructed, which allows the safe handling of acetylene up to 30 bars. This unique setup allows studying both batch and flow reactions under pressurized conditions with the possibility of online product analysis. Here, acetylene oligomerization to selectively unsaturated C4 products is the reaction of interest. This project offers novel catalytic systems for the selective oligomerization of acetylene under pressure into more valuable products such as butadiene or other unsaturated C4 products. These products are important building blocks for synthetic polymers, long-chain alcohols, and other chemicals. Furthermore, this project shows possible solutions for common challenges, such as very fast deactivation of the active metals and the selectivity problems. For the ethanol conversion into acetaldehyde by non-oxidative dehydrogenation, a versatile flow setup was modified. Acetaldehyde is a very important bulk chemical, widely used as a precursor for the synthesis of acetic acid, acetic anhydride, ethyl acetate, and many more largely produced chemicals. Even though this reaction has been studied, the low selectivity and deactivation of the catalysts still remain as challenges. To overcome these problems, Cu-based catalysts impregnated on self-supported nanostructured-zirconia, which was synthesized by hard templating using SBA-15-OH or KIT-6-OH, were employed for the conversion of non-oxidative ethanol dehydrogenation to acetaldehyde