Research progress in catalysts for CO esterification to dimethyl carbonate by Fujian Institute of physical structure, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Dimethyl carbonate is known as green chemicals, and its demand grows rapidly with the rapid development of power battery and polycarbonate industry At present, the mainstream ester exchange technology in industry has many problems, such as high product cost, serious pollution in the production process of propylene oxide Compared with the transesterification method, the raw materials of CO esterification to dimethyl carbonate are only methanol, CO and O2 The product cost is low and has a strong competitive advantage However, due to the low activity, selectivity and stability of the catalyst, the catalytic technology of CO esterification to dimethyl carbonate has not been industrialized With the support of national key R & D program, national fund major research program, Chinese Academy of Sciences pilot a, youth innovation promotion association of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xu Zhongning, researcher of guoguocong research group, State Key Laboratory of structural chemistry, Fujian Institute of physical architecture, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Chen Zhenning, deputy researcher of Zhuang Wei research group, worked closely together, On the basis of the experimental results, the catalytic functional units of product selective regulation are revealed through theoretical calculation: the atom level dispersed single PD active center is conducive to the formation of dimethyl carbonate through eley rideal mechanism, while the double PD active center is conducive to the formation of another product dimethyl oxalate through Langmuir Hinshelwood mechanism Furthermore, the stable atom level Pd catalyst was synthesized by theoretical calculation, rational design and controllable synthesis By means of spherical aberration correction electron microscopy and synchrotron radiation, the author confirmed that the single PD active center dispersed at the atomic level in the catalyst exists in the coordination structure of pdo4, which is consistent with the theoretical design of catalyst model structure The catalyst shows good catalytic performance: the CO conversion rate is more than 80%, the selectivity of DMC is close to 100%, and the performance has no degradation after 100 hours of continuous operation The results of this study will speed up the industrialization of the catalytic technology of CO esterification to dimethyl carbonate The related basic research results were published online in ACS Catalysis (DOI: 10.1021 / acscalal 9b00286).