Ethanol Coupling Reactions over MgO-Al2O3 Mixed Oxide-Based Catalysts for Producing Biofuel Additives.

Catalytic conversion of ethanol to 1-butanol was studied over MgO-Al2O3 mixed oxide-based catalysts. Relationships between acid-base and catalytic properties and the effect of active metal on the hydrogen transfer reaction steps were investigated. The acid-base properties were studied by temperature-programmed desorption of CO2 and NH3 and by the FT-IR spectroscopic examination of adsorbed pyridine. Dispersion of the metal promoter (Pd, Pt, Ru, Ni) was determined by CO pulse chemisorption. The ethanol coupling reaction was studied using a flow-through microreactor system, He or H2 carrier gas, WHSV = 1 gEtOH·gcat.-1·h-1, at 21 bar, and 200-350 °C. Formation and transformation of surface species under catalytic conditions were studied by DRIFT spectroscopy. The highest butanol selectivity and yield was observed when the MgO-Al2O3 catalyst contained a relatively high amount of strong-base and medium-strong Lewis acid sites. The presence of metal improved the activity both in He and H2; however, the butanol selectivity significantly decreased at temperatures ≥ 300 °C due to acceleration of undesired side reactions. DRIFT spectroscopic results showed that the active metal promoted H-transfer from H2 over the narrow temperature range of 200-250 °C, where the equilibrium allowed significant concentrations of both dehydrogenated and hydrogenated products.

A general formulation of the quasiclassical trajectory method for reduced-dimensionality reaction dynamics calculations.

Dimension reduction by freezing the unimportant coordinates is widely used in intramolecular and reaction dynamics calculations when the solution of the accurate full-dimensional nuclear Schrödinger equation is not feasible. In this paper we report on a novel form of the exact classical internal-coordinate Hamiltonian for full and reduced-dimensional vibrational motion of polyatomic molecules with the purpose of using it in quasiclassical trajectory (QCT) calculations. The derivation is based on the internal to body-fixed frame transformation, as in the t-vector formalism, however it does not require the introduction of rotational variables to allow cancellation of non-physical rotations within the body-fixed frame. The formulas needed for QCT calculations: normal mode analysis and state sampling as well as for following the dynamics and normal-mode quantum number assignment at instantaneous states are presented. The procedure is demonstrated on the CH4, CD4, CH3D and CHD3 isotopologs of methane using three reduced-dimensional models, which were previously used in quantum reactive scattering studies of the CH4 + X → CH3 + HX type reactions. The reduced-dimensional QCT methodology formulated this way combined with full-dimensional QCT calculations makes possible the classical validation of reduced-dimensional models that are used in the quantum mechanical description of the nuclear dynamics in reactive systems [A. Vikár et al., J. Phys. Chem. A, 2016, 120, 5083-5093].

Testing the Palma-Clary Reduced Dimensionality Model Using Classical Mechanics on the CH4 + H → CH3 + H2 Reaction.

Application of exact quantum scattering methods in theoretical reaction dynamics of bimolecular reactions is limited by the complexity of the equations of nuclear motion to be solved. Simplification is often achieved by reducing the number of degrees of freedom to be explicitly handled by freezing the less important spectator modes. The reaction cross sections obtained in reduced-dimensionality (RD) quantum scattering methods can be used in the calculation of rate coefficients, but their physical meaning is limited. The accurate test of the performance of a reduced-dimensionality method would be a comparison of the RD cross sections with those obtained in accurate full-dimensional (FD) calculations, which is not feasible because of the lack of complete full-dimensional results. However, classical mechanics allows one to perform reaction dynamics calculations using both the RD and the FD model. In this paper, an RD versus FD comparison is made for the 8-dimensional Palma-Clary model on the example of four isotopologs of the CH4 + H → CH3 + H2 reaction, which has 12 internal dimensions. In the Palma-Clary model, the only restriction is that the methyl group is confined to maintain C3v symmetry. Both RD and FD opacity and excitation functions as well as differential cross sections were calculated using the quasiclassical trajectory method. The initial reactant separation has been handled according to our one-period averaging method [ Nagy et al. J. Chem. Phys. 2016, 144, 014104 ]. The RD and FD excitation functions were found to be close to each other for some isotopologs, but in general, the RD reactivity parameters are lower than the FD reactivity parameters beyond statistical error, and for one of the isotopologs, the deviation is significant. This indicates that the goodness of RD cross sections cannot be taken for granted.

Oscillatory reaction cross sections caused by normal mode sampling in quasiclassical trajectory calculations.

The quasiclassical trajectory (QCT) method is an efficient and important tool for studying the dynamics of bimolecular reactions. In this method, the motion of the atoms is simulated classically, and the only quantum effect considered is that the initial vibrational states of reactant molecules are semiclassically quantized. A sensible expectation is that the initial ensemble of classical molecular states generated this way should be stationary, similarly to the quantum state it is supposed to represent. The most widely used method for sampling the vibrational phase space of polyatomic molecules is based on the normal mode approximation. In the present work, it is demonstrated that normal mode sampling provides a nonstationary ensemble even for a simple molecule like methane, because real potential energy surfaces are anharmonic in the reactant domain. The consequences were investigated for reaction CH4 + H → CH3 + H2 and its various isotopologs and were found to be dramatic. Reaction probabilities and cross sections obtained from QCT calculations oscillate periodically as a function of the initial distance of the colliding partners and the excitation functions are erratic. The reason is that in the nonstationary ensemble of initial states, the mean bond length of the breaking C-H bond oscillates in time with the frequency of the symmetric stretch mode. We propose a simple method, one-period averaging, in which reactivity parameters are calculated by averaging over an entire period of the mean C-H bond length oscillation, which removes the observed artifacts and provides the physically most reasonable reaction probabilities and cross sections when the initial conditions for QCT calculations are generated by normal mode sampling.

Modeling the electron-impact dissociation of methane.

The product yield of the electron-impact dissociation of methane has been studied with a combination of three theoretical methods: R-matrix theory to determine the electronically inelastic collisional excitation cross sections, high-level electronic structure methods to determine excited states energies and derivative couplings, and trajectory surface hopping (TSH) calculations to determine branching in the dissociation of the methane excited states to give CH(3), CH(2), and CH. The calculations involve the lowest 24 excited-state potential surfaces of methane, up to the ionization energy. According to the R-matrix calculations, electron impact preferentially produces triplet excited states, especially for electron kinetic energies close to the dissociation threshold. The potential surfaces of excited states are characterized by numerous avoided and real crossings such that the TSH calculations show rapid cascading down to the lowest excited singlet or triplet states, and then slower the dissociation of these lowest states. Product branching for electron-impact dissociation was therefore estimated by combining the electron-impact excitation cross sections with TSH product branching ratios that were obtained from the lowest singlet and triplet states, with the singlet dissociation giving a comparable formation of CH(2) and CH(3) while triplet dissociation gives CH(3) exclusively. The overall branching in electron-impact dissociation is dominated by CH(3) over CH(2). A small branching yield for CH is also predicted.