Design of a Small Organic Template for the Synthesis of Self-Pillared Pentasil Zeolite Nanosheets
Ye Ma, Xiaomin Tang, Junyi Hu, Yanhang Ma, Wei Chen, Zhiqiang Liu, Shichao Han, Xu Cheng, Qinming Wu, Anmin Zheng, Longfeng Zhu, Xiangju Meng, Feng‐Shou Xiao
Abstract
Zeolite nanosheets with excellent mass transfer are attractive, but their successful syntheses are normally resulted from a huge number of experiments. Here, we show the design of a small organic template for the synthesis of self-pillared pentasil (SPP) zeolite nanosheets from theoretical calculations in interaction energies between organic templates and pentasil zeolite skeletons. As expected, the SPP zeolite nanosheets with the thickness at 10-20 nm have been synthesized successfully. Characterizations show that the SPP zeolite nanosheets with about 90% MFI and 10% MEL structures have good crystallinity, the house-of-card morphology, large surface area, and fully four-coordinated aluminum species. More importantly, methanol-to-propylene tests show that the SPP zeolite nanosheets exhibit much higher propylene selectivity and longer reaction lifetime than conventional ZSM-5 zeolite. These results offer a good opportunity to develop highly efficient zeolite catalysts in the future.