Elucidating the Effect of Ion Exchange Protocol on the Copper Exchange Efficacy, Copper Siting, and SCR Activity in Cu-SSZ-13.

The front cover artwork is provided by Professor Jean-Sabin McEwen at Washington State University. The image shows how ion exchanges prepared with different copper precursors influence how the copper ultimately sites relative to the zeolite framework, which ultimately impacts its catalytic reactivity for the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx in Cu-SSZ-13. Read the full text of the Research Article at 10.1002/cphc.202300271.

Elucidating the Effect of Ion Exchange Protocol on the Copper Exchange Efficacy, Copper Siting, and SCR activity in Cu-SSZ-13.

The influence of the copper ion exchange protocol on SCR activity of SSZ-13 is quantified. Using the same parent SSZ-13 zeolite, four exchange protocols are used to assess how exchange protocol impacts metal uptake and SCR activity. Large differences in the SCR activity, nearly 30 percentage points at 160 °C at constant copper content, are observed for different exchange protocols implying that different exchange protocols lead to different copper species. Hydrogen temperature programmed reduction on selected samples and infrared spectroscopy of CO binding corroborates this conclusion as the reactivity at 160 °C correlates with the intensity of the IR band at 2162 cm-1 . DFT-based calculations show that such an IR assignment is consistent with CO adsorbed on a Cu(I) cation within an eight-membered ring. This work shows that SCR activity can be influenced by the ion exchange process even when different protocols lead to the same metal loading. Perhaps most interesting, a protocol used to generate Cu-MOR for methane to methanol studies led to the most active catalyst both on a unit mass or unit mole copper basis. This points to a yet not recognized means to tailor catalyst activity as the open literature is silent on this issue.