Acetone reactions over the surfaces of polycrystalline UO2: a kinetic and spectroscopic study

The reaction of acetone is studied on the surfaces of polycrystalline UO2, prepared by hydrogen reduction of U3O8 at 770 K. The study is conducted by in situ Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and temperature-programmed desorption (TPD). Acetone adsorption does not fit the simple Langmuir model, and adsorbate-adsorbate interactions are found to be significant. Acetone adsorbs molecularly on UO2 as evidenced by the nuCO of the eta1(O) mode at 1686 cm(-1). Part of acetone is reduced to the isopropoxide species ((CH3)2HC-O-U4+) upon heating (nu(CC), rho(CH3) at 1167 cm(-1) and nu(CO), rho(CH3) at 980 cm(-1)), and upon further heating, acetates (CH3COO(a), (a) for adsorbed) are observed. Detailed TPD studies indicated that the main reaction of acetone on UO2 is the deoxygenation to propene, driven by the oxophilic nature of UO2. Other reactions were also observed to a lesser extent, and these included reductive coupling to 2,3-dimethylbutene and condensation to mesityl oxide. An attempt to extract kinetic parameters from TPD data was conducted. Three models were studied: variation of heating rate, leading edge analysis (Habenschaden-Kuppers method), and complete analysis. The complete analysis provided the most plausible results, in particular, at low coverage. With this method, at nearly zero coverage the activation energy, Ed, for desorption was found to be close to 140 kJ/mol with a prefactor of 10(13) s(-1). Ed dropped sharply with increasing coverage, theta, to ca. 35 kJ/mol at theta=0.15 with a prefactor of 10(11) s(-1). The activation energy for the desorption of acetone on UO2(111) single crystals, at saturation coverage, was previously found to be equal to 65 kJ/mol using the leading edge analysis.