Cobalt-nitrogen-activated carbon as catalyst in acetylene hydrochlorination

The development of new non-mercury based catalysts for the vinyl chloride industrial production has attracted recently the attention of many researchers. In spite of the good activity of Au-based supported catalysts reported so far, the high cost of gold impedes future use of such catalysts. In the present work, an environmentally friendly non-precious transition metal coordinated N-doped carbon material as a catalyst for acetylene hydrochlorination reaction was developed, which shows good catalytic performance. The catalyst was characterized by Transmission Electron Microscopy coupled with Energy Dispersive X-ray analysis (TEM-EDX), X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS). The obtained results indicated that Co-N-AC catalyst can significantly improve the adsorption of HCl. And XPS result demonstrated the presence of Co-N-x, which plays a major role in acetylene hydrochlorination reaction.