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Fresh evidence challenges the consensus view of active sites in an industrial catalyst

A study of the industrial catalyst titanium silicalite-1 suggests that the conventional view of the structure of its active sites is wrong. The findings might enable further optimization of related industrial catalysts.
  1. Bert M. Weckhuysen

    1. Bert M. Weckhuysen is in the Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis Group, Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, 3584 CG Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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Metal ions trapped in crystalline microporous solids known as zeolites are promising solid-state catalysts for a wide variety of oxidation reactions1–3. In the past few decades, there has been intense research into the structure and nuclearity (the number of metal ions) of the active sites in these zeolite-based catalysts4,5. Despite these efforts, there is still no agreement on the nuclearity: the proposed number of metal ions in the active sites ranges from one to three1,2,4,5. Writing in Nature, Gordon et al.6 propose that there are two titanium ions in the active sites of a well-characterized industrial zeolite catalyst called titanium silicalite-1 (TS-1), challenging the widely accepted idea that there is only one. Their work has implications not only for TS-1, but also for other metal-containing zeolites for which the structure of the active sites is not yet fully established.

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Nature 586, 678-679 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02942-w

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