Improvement of selective oxidations of green methanol and propane on VOx based catalysts for the production of sustainable, valuable chemical products including deactivation-regeneration studies

This project aims to support the continuation of a success cooperation between the Chair for Chemical Process Engineering at OvGU (Prof. Christof Hamel) with Dr.-Ing. Leo Alvarado Perea who works at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas and at the OvGU from Magdeburg Germany.

During the time of the doctorate studies and more recently, Mr. Alvarado Perea studied a promising process to produce directly propene from ethene (2010-2021). Since then, we have had a close cooperation by working in this topic. New and novel processes for producing valuable chemical products are subject of study and still being new cooperation opportunities. One of the questions that have motivated these new cooperation options is the catalyst deactivation that has been reported in our previous contributions during the propene production.Thus, we present this proposal for continuing our successful cooperation by studying two new promising reactions for producing valuable products, building blocks and platform chemicals.

a) The coupled oxidative and thermal dehydrogenation of propane using VOx-Al₂O₃ based catalysts, taking into account catalyst deactivation by coking and periodically regeneration, as bridging technology in chemical industry.
b) The selective oxidation of bio-based methanol to methylformate (MF), dimethylether (DME) and dimethoxymethane (DMM) as potential green platform chemicals using VOx/TiO₂ catalytic systems.