Performance of CuCl2/13X catalyst in acetylene hydrochlorination

Abstract

Catalysts CuCl2/13X were prepared from the combination of 13X zeolite and copper chloride, and they exhibited excellent stability and vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) selectivity in acetylene hydrochlorination. The effects of copper chloride loading amount, reaction temperature, acetylene space velocity and pretreatment temperature on CuCl2/13X catalyst's catalytic performance were investigated. It was found that after pretreatment under 300 °C, 25CuCl2/13X displayed the best catalytic performance at reaction temperature of 220 °C and acetylene space velocity of 30 h−1, and its acetylene conversion and VCM selectivity was higher than 78% and 99%, respectively, and the catalyst's reactivity slightly increased after 16-h reaction. Different techniques including low temperature physical adsorption of nitrogen, breakthrough experiment, thermogravimetric analysis (TG), differential scanning calorimetry (XRD) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) were employed to characterize the catalysts. The results demonstrated that the strong HCl adsorption ability of CuCl2/13X catalyst and the enhancement between 13X and copper chloride explained why the catalytic performance of CuCl2/13X was better than that of CuCl2/AC.