Cooperative bimetallic catalyst for thio-etherification reaction prepared by crystal-facet engineering of γ-Al2O3 support

Abstract In alumina-based catalysts the properties of the alumina support directly influence the structure (size, morphology, orientation, etc.) of the resulting active phase and ultimately determine the performance of the final catalysts. This paper presents a facile and efficient method for γ-Al2O3 to simultaneously expose {111} facets with strong acidity and {110} facets with moderate basicity. It is shown that the metal oxides NiOx and MoOx can be selectively deposited and subsequently sulfided on the respective facets to form a NiS2-MoS2/Al2O3 catalyst with substantially enhanced activity for thio-etherification reaction. By cooperative action of the active sites on the newly exposed facets, the catalyst is shown to have superior activity over a conventional NiMoS/Al2O3 catalyst in the thio-etherification reaction between ethanethiol and isoamylene (2-methyl-2-butene) to yield ethylamyl thioethers. Our findings show that tuning the physicochemical properties via crystal facet engineering and inducing cooperative catalysis via preferential deposition of active metals open a novel avenue for the rational design and synthesis of high performance catalysts.