The Effect of Si/Al Ratio for Pd/BEA and Pd/SSZ-13 Used as Passive NOx Adsorbers

Journal article, 2018

The mitigation of cold-start emissions involves the development of passive NOx adsorbers (PNA) systems that store NOx at low temperature, being designed to release the trapped NOx at higher temperatures, where downstream NOx reduction catalysts are efficient. Pd-based zeolites (BEA, SSZ-13) with different SAR (Si-to-Al ratio) were used for PNA investigation, and Pd/Ce/Al2O3 catalyst was used as a reference for comparison. In this study, NOx adsorption is investigated at low temperature (80 °C) and it is released during a temperature ramp (to 400 °C) under various gas feed composition. Moreover, detailed characterization was performed using BET, XRD, XPS, TPO, STEM and ICP-SFMS and the stored NO species was studied using in-situ DRIFTS. The addition of CO to the storage mixture resulted in that for Pd/zeolites with low and medium SAR the binding energy for NO was increased. In addition, NO was stored in larger quantities, especially for the Pd/SSZ-13 samples. However, for Pd/BEA (SAR = 300) no such stable NO species was formed and for Pd/Ce/Al2O3 the CO addition was even negative. Moreover, in-situ NO DRIFTS showed that there was large amount of nitrosyls on ionic palladium for the Pd/zeolites with low and medium SAR, indicating that a significant fraction of the palladium was in ion-exchanged positions, while this peak was small for the Pd/BEA (SAR = 300) and non-existing for Pd/Ce/Al2O3. Thus, CO addition is beneficial for Pd species that are in ion-exchanged positions, but this is not the case for Pd particles and this can explain the observations that CO is only beneficial for Pd/zeolites with low and medium SAR. Moreover, experiments with similar SAR [Pd/BEA (SAR = 25) and Pd/SSZ-13 (SAR = 24)], showed that there is larger stability of the stored NOx in the small pore Pd/SSZ-13.