In search for active non-precious metal catalyst for VOC combustion: Evaluation of plasma deposited Co and Co/Cu oxide catalysts on metallic structured carriers

The study is devoted to the evaluation of the cobalt and copper doped cobalt catalysts deposited on the structured carriers for VOC combustion. The catalysts have been tested in n-hexane oxidation in the jet-stirred gradientless reactor at various temperatures. As the reactor has occurred not to provide sufficient mixing conditions a model has been proposed which allowed to discriminate between external mass transport phenomena and the intrinsic kinetics. The values of the activation energy found for cobalt catalysts were higher than usually reported in the literature indicating the necessity of lab-to-lab normalisation of the results. The best performance in n-hexane combustion was observed for the copper doped cobalt catalyst on the wire gauze carrier which showed the lowest light-off temperature (220 °C) and the highest reaction rate with activation energy (111 kJ/mol) comparable to other cobalt catalysts studied.