Probing the dynamics of methanol in copper-loaded zeolites via quasi-elastic and inelastic neutron scattering

Abstract

The dynamics of methanol within prototype methanol synthesis catalysts were studied using quasi-elastic neutron scattering. Three Cu-exchanged zeolites (mordenite, SSZ-13 and ZSM-5) were studied after methanol loading and showed jump diffusion coefficients between 1.04 × 10⁻¹⁰ and 2.59 × 10⁻¹⁰ m²·s^–1. Non-Arrhenius behavior was observed with varying temperature due to methoxy formation at Brønsted acid sites and methanol clustering around copper cations.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

quasielastic neutron scattering / inelastic neutron scattering / methanol / diffusion / zeolites

References

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Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering, ANSTO and the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, in supporting the neutron research infrastructure used in this work via ACNS proposal P13488. The ISIS neutron and Muon source also awarded a grant of beamtime (RB2220457). This is publicly available at the ISIS data archive [26]. We also wish to thank Johnson Matthey for their gift of the zeolite SSZ-13 sample.

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