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Updated: Nov 10, 2025

Supercritical Nitrogen Processing for the Purification of Reactive Porous Materials
Published on: May 15, 2015
Isolated boron in zeolite for oxidative dehydrogenation of propane
Hang Zhou1,2, Xianfeng Yi3,2, Yu Hui4,2
1Key Lab of Biomass Chemical Engineering of Ministry of Education, College of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China.
Abstract:
Oxidative dehydrogenation of propane (ODHP) is a key technology for producing propene from shale gas, but conventional metal oxide catalysts are prone to overoxidation to form valueless CO Boron-based catalysts were recently found to be selective for this reaction, and B-O-B oligomers are generally regarded as active centers. We show here that the isolated boron in a zeolite framework without such oligomers exhibits high activity and selectivity for ODHP, which also hinders full hydrolysis for boron leaching in a humid atmosphere because of the B-O-SiO linkage, achieving superior durability in a long-period test. Furthermore, we demonstrate an isolated boron with a -B[OH…O(H)-Si]2 structure in borosilicate zeolite as the active center, which enables the activation of oxygen and a carbon-hydrogen bond to catalyze the ODHP.
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