Synthesis of hollow HZSM-5 zeolite-based catalysts and catalytic performance in MTA reaction

Although HZSM-5 zeolite is more and more widely used in petrochemical industry and other fields, its single narrow micropore system often leads to mass transfer issues during some types of catalytic reactions. In addition, dealumination in the presence of steam and coking due to the presence of strong acids sites are issues of aluminosilicate catalysts in general. In this work, a simple post-treatment method based on the traditional prepared HZSM-5 catalyst was proposed and an outlayer SiO2 encapsulated Gd/HZSM-5 catalyst with hollow and hierarchical porous systems (Si@Gd/Z5-T) was obtained. This catalyst can overcome those defects for the traditional HZSM-5 mentioned above, such as, the outermost SiO2 layer can protect the aluminum species in the framework of Gd/HZSM-5 and cover part of strong acid sites, and the hollow and hierarchical porous systems can minimize the mass transfer resistance, etc. The Si@Gd/Z5-T catalyst exhibited high selectivity of BTX (65.7%), especially xylene (39.7%), in the methanol to aromatics reaction (MTA) owing to the suitable acidity and optimized porous system. In addition, the Si@Gd/Z5-T catalyst possessed much better hydrothermal stability and the excellent anticoking ability in the MTA reaction as expected. Thus, this should be a general method for the modification of silica alumina molecular sieve catalysts to obtain the novel catalyst with hollow and hierarchical porous systems, adjustable acidity and high hydrothermal stability.