Pretreatment Effect on CO Oxidation over Highly Ordered Mesoporous Silver Catalyst

Highly ordered mesoporous silver material was successfully synthesized from a mesoporous silica template (KIT-6) with 3-D channel structure using the nano-replication method. The effects of H2 or O2 pretreatments on the catalytic performance of the mesoporous silver were investigated using a temperature programmed CO oxidation technique in a fixed bed reactor. The mesoporous silver material that was pretreated with H2 exhibited an excellent catalytic activity compared to the as-prepared and O2-pretreated catalysts. Moreover, this present mesoporous silver material showed good catalytic stability. For the CO oxidation, the apparent activation energy of the H2-pretreated mesoporous silver catalyst was 61 ± 0.5 kJ mol-1, which was also much lower than the as-prepared (132 ± 1.5 kJ mol-1) and O2-pretreated (124 ± 1.4 kJ mol-1) catalysts