A novel fused iron catalyst for ammonia synthesis promoted with rare earth gangue

Rare earth gangue, which mainly consists of mixtures of light rare earths such as lanthana, ceria, neodymium oxide and praseodymium oxide, was used as the promoter of fused iron catalysts for ammonia synthesis. The result showed that the activity of the catalyst promoted with rare earth gangue was comparable with those of commercial iron catalysts with high amount of cobalt. The role of rare earths was owed to their advantages for favoring the deep reduction of the main composite in catalyst, i.e., iron oxide. This finding indicated that the use of rare earth gangue could decrease the content of cobalt or even completely replace cobalt, which was used to be regarded as unsubstitutable promoters for high performance ammonia catalyst; therefore, the cost of fused iron catalysts would decrease significantly.