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X-ray physico-chemical imaging during activation of cobalt-based Fischer-Tropsch synthesis catalysts

Beale, AM; Jacques, SDM; Di Michiel, M; Mosselmans, JFW; Price, SWT; Senecal, P; Vamvakeros, A; (2017) X-ray physico-chemical imaging during activation of cobalt-based Fischer-Tropsch synthesis catalysts. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society a-mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences , 376 (2110) 10.1098/rsta.2017.0057. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

The imaging of catalysts and other functional materials under reaction conditions has advanced significantly in recent years. The combination of the computed tomography (CT) approach with methods such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) now enables local chemical and physical state information to be extracted from within the interiors of intact materials which are, by accident or design, inhomogeneous. In this work, we follow the phase evolution during the initial reduction step(s) to form Co metal, for Co-containing particles employed as Fischer–Tropsch synthesis (FTS) catalysts; firstly, working at small length scales (approx. micrometre spatial resolution), a combination of sample size and density allows for transmission of comparatively low energy signals enabling the recording of ‘multimodal’ tomography, i.e. simultaneous XRF–CT, XANES–CT and XRD–CT. Subsequently, we show high-energy XRD–CT can be employed to reveal extent of reduction and uniformity of crystallite size on millimetre-sized TiO2 trilobes. In both studies, the CoO phase is seen to persist or else evolve under particular operating conditions and we speculate as to why this is observed.

Type: Article
Title: X-ray physico-chemical imaging during activation of cobalt-based Fischer-Tropsch synthesis catalysts
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2017.0057
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2017.0057
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: physico-chemical, tomography, cobalt, Fischer–Tropsch, spectroscopy, scattering
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Chemistry
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10040589
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