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Interfacial effects between carbon nanotube templates and precursors on fabricating a wall-crystallized hierarchical pore system in zeolite crystals

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Abstract

The failure in some direct synthesis of hierarchical zeolite with a hard- or soft-templating method would be caused by the brittle binding forces between the templates and zeolite precursors or frameworks. In present work, high-quality hierarchically porous ZSM-5 with crystalline pore walls is synthesized by using hydroxylated carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as templates. Mesopores structure with a size of about 10–35 nm similar to the diameters of the CNTs template is successfully fabricated in the as-synthesized ZSM-5 zeolite. The structural and textural properties of the as-synthesized samples are revealed by characterization of X-ray powder diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, in situ infrared spectroscopy of pyridine, temperature-programmed desorption of ammonia (NH3-TPD), N2 adsorption–desorption, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in details. Catalytic cracking of tri-isopropylbenzene is chosen as a probe reaction so as to explore the catalytic performances of the hierarchical zeolite because of its notably increased external surfaces resulted from the created hierarchical pore system. A hierarchically cracking manner of bulky reactants is found over the as-synthesized the meso-zeolite ZSM-5.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by NSFC (21371129, U19B2003, 21706177) and SinoPEC (116050).

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  1. Lichen Zhang and Xiaobo Sun have contributed equally to this paper.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, 030024, People’s Republic of China

    Lichen Zhang, Xiaobo Sun, Meng Pan, Xiaona Yang, Yanchao Liu, Jinghui Sun, Quanhua Wang, Jiajun Zheng, Yan Wang, Jinghong Ma, Wenlin Li & Ruifeng Li

  2. College of Biological and Chemical Engineering, Anhui Polytechnic University, Anhui, 241000, People’s Republic of China

    Meng Pan

  3. Research Centre of Energy Chemical and Catalytic Technology, Taiyuan University of Technology, 79# West Yingze Street, Taiyuan, 030024, People’s Republic of China

    Jiajun Zheng & Ruifeng Li

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  1. Lichen Zhang
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Zhang, L., Sun, X., Pan, M. et al. Interfacial effects between carbon nanotube templates and precursors on fabricating a wall-crystallized hierarchical pore system in zeolite crystals. J Mater Sci 55, 10412–10426 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-020-04708-1

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