CO2 oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane to ethylene: Reaction mechanism elucidation by tandem-reaction couplings

CO₂ oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane to ethylene (CO₂-ODHE) is a promising technology for carbon emission reduction in ethylene industry, which is a major part of the petrochemical industry. However, the complicated reaction networks significantly restricted researchers’ capability to fully understand the intrinsic catalytic behaviors and to design efficient catalysts. The reaction networks remain one of the major obstacles to explore highly efficient and durable catalysts for CO₂-ODHE reaction. Different from the usual researches where reaction mechanism investigations are fulfilled by relating catalyst performance to catalyst structure characterizations, this research provides a feasible reaction mechanism elucidation by qualitatively and quantitatively assessing the apparent reaction paths over the catalysts without catalyst structure characterizations. This approach can reveal ethane and CO₂ reaction routes in CO₂-ODHE by reaction couplings and enables the involvement percentage calculation of both ethane and CO₂ in the reaction networks. Through relative errors and gray correlation analysis, the approach’s application scope and rationality have been investigated and clarified. By revealing the reaction path, the proposed analysis approach can effectively guide the rational design of highly efficient catalysts for CO₂-ODHE and other similar complicated tandem-reaction systems. No catalysts research is involved in this paper.