Study on the effect of different metal oxides on the performance of cobalt-based Fischer-Tropsch catalysts

In this paper, three metal oxides, ZrO₂, Al₂O₃ and MnO₂, loaded with 1% content on hexagonal nanosheets of Co₃O₄ (NMS-Co), respectively, were prepared as reversed-phase catalyst models to investigate the effects of metal oxides on the performance of cobalt-based catalysts for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. The results of H₂-TPD, CO-TPD and catalyst performance evaluation revealed that ZrO₂ and Al₂O₃ could significantly increase the active sites of NMS-Co catalysts, lower the reaction temperature from 230 ℃ to 170 and 180 ℃, respectively, and increase the heavy hydrocarbon generation rate by 2.5 and 2 times, respectively, under the same conversion conditions. The CH₄ selectivity was reduced from 37.8% to 3.6% and 12.0%, respectively. However, MnO₂ increased the CO conversion only from 30.9% to 45.5% and decreased the CH₄ selectivity to 16.5%. A new idea is proposed to investigate the effect of metal oxides on the performance of cobalt-based Fischer-Tropsch catalysts.