Influence of the textural properties of an activated carbon catalyst on the oxidative dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene

Activated carbons can be used as catalyst supports or as catalysts on their own. An example of the latter case is the oxidative dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene (ODE), which can be of industrial relevance. In this work, a systematic study of the influence of the texture of the activated carbon in the ODE reaction is carried out. Starting from the same material, two types of experiments were made, the first where the porosity of the catalyst was enlarged by carbon gasification and the second where it was partially blocked by carbon deposition. All the carbon catalysts were characterised by nitrogen adsorption at 77 K (textural properties) and TPD (surface chemical properties) before and after reaction, and their performances in the ODE were evaluated. The results show that the texture effects are important up to a certain pore size; for larger pore sizes, the surface chemistry controls catalyst performance.