Photocatalytic and chemical oxidation of organic compounds in supercritical carbon dioxide. 1998 annual progress report

Technical Report · Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 1998

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/13734· OSTI ID:13734

Blake, D M

'This report summarizes the results of work done during the first 1.3 years of a three year project. During the first nine months effort focussed on the design, construction and testing of a closed recirculating system that can be used to study photochemistry in supercritical carbon dioxide at pressures up to 5,000 psi and temperatures up to about 50 C. This was followed by a period of work in which the photocatalytic oxidation of benzene and acetone in supercritical, liquid, and gaseous carbon dioxide containing dissolved oxygen was demonstrated. The photocatalyst was titanium dioxide supported on glass spheres. This was the first time it was possible to observe photocatalytic oxidation in a supercritical fluid and to compare reaction in the three fluid phases of a solvent. This also demonstrated that it is possible to purify supercritical and liquid carbon dioxide using photochemical oxidation with no chemical additions other than oxygen. The oxidation of benzene produced no intermediates detectable using on line spectroscopic analysis or by gas chromatographic analysis of samples taken from the flow system. The catalyst surface did darken as the reaction proceeded indicating that oxidation products were accumulating on the surface. This is analogous to the behavior of aromatic compounds in air phase photocatalytic oxidation. The reaction of acetone under similar conditions resulted in the formation of low levels of by-products. Two were identified as products of the reaction of acetone with itself (4-methyl-3-penten-2-one and 4-hydroxy-4-methyl-2-pentanone) using gas chromatography with a mass spectrometer detector. Two other by-products also appear to be from the self-reaction of acetone. By-products of this type had not been observed in prior studies of the gas-phase photocatalytic oxidation of acetone. The by-products that have been observed can also be oxidized under the treatment conditions. The above results establish that photocatalytic oxidation of organic compounds in supercritical carbon dioxide can be achieved. Until recently it was not possible for us to obtain high quality, quantitative kinetic data. The original flow cell used to obtain UV-Visible spectra on the recirculating fluid did not provide quantitative concentration data because the sapphire windows did not have adequate transmission characteristics below about 240 nm. A pair of windows with better transmission properties arrived as this report was being prepared. While waiting for the replacement windows for the flow cell, the concentration of reactants was monitored by withdrawing samples of the fluid stream for gas chromatographic analysis. This allowed progress to be made in determining some of the factors that affected the rates of reaction in a qualitative sense but the results had large error bars due to the difficulty in obtaining reproducible samples from the pressurized system using gas tight syringes. This problem was recently solved by incorporating a gas chromatograph with automatic sampling valves into the flow system. The two on line analytical methods will now result in reliable analytical data that can be used to follow the reaction kinetics and detect and identify reaction intermediates and by-products, if any are formed.'

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Environmental Management (EM), Office of Science and Risk Policy
• OSTI ID: 13734
• Report Number(s): EMSP-54847-98; ON: DE00013734
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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