A General Synthesis Strategy for Highly Dispersed Amorphous MoO₃ over Supported Catalysts

Abstract

Amorphous MoO3 was evenly deposited on a Bi2SiO5/SiO2 support by a strategy of heterogenous coprecipitation using Ti as structural promoter. The structure and properties of MoO3‐Bi2SiO5/SiO2 have been characterized by a series of techniques, including N2 adsorption/desorption analysis, X‐ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and ultraviolet‐visible light (UV‐vis) diffuse reflectance spectra (DRS).The addition of n‐butyl alcohol into synthesis medium resulted in the most dispersive amorphous MoO3, with an average particle size of 4 nm. Selective oxidation of propylene was chosen as a probe reaction to test the performance of catalysts. Kinetic study revealed that the method of heterogeneous coprecipitation enhanced catalytic performance via increasing the number of active sites, rather than changing the nature of it. This is well compatible with characterization results.