A decline in the availability of coproduct propene from naphtha cracking opens up a market opportunity for an alternative approach for supplying the alkene, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin — Madison (UW-Madison). They have developed a process for the oxidative dehydrogenation of propane (ODHP) that markedly outperforms others. The key is use of boron nitride as catalyst; it provides unique and unexpected catalytic properties, they note.
The team at Madison, led by chemistry and chemical engineering professor Ive Hermans, used hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and boron nitride nanotubes as catalysts. The boron-nitride-catalyzed process provides higher selectivity than that achieved with the supported vanadium oxide catalysts typically used for ODHP, they report (Figure 1). Moreover, their process yields ethylene as coproduct instead of carbon dioxide and other undesirable byproducts formed with other catalysts. The boron-nitride-catalyzed process gave 79%-propene and 12%-ethene selectivity at 14% propane conversion. More details on the process appear in a recent article in Science.
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“Boron nitride catalysts are nontoxic, they don’t contain precious metals, and they reduce the temperature of the reaction, resulting in energy savings,” notes graduate student Joseph Grant, a member of the team that developed the process.
Hermans points out another plus: “What is great about this result is that we see catalytic activity using commercially available hBN. This material is already produced in large-scale quantities. Scale-up of the catalyst is a typical hurdle for many catalytic reactions. So this is at least one problem that people seemed to have cracked.”