Catalytic selective oxidation of isobutane in a decoupled redox-process

The catalytic selective oxidation of isobutane to methacrolein (MAC) and methacrylic acid (MAA) is known to proceed via a Mars-Van Krevelen mechanism. When the reaction is performed in a common reactor with co-feeding of the reactant and oxygen, reactive oxygen species are present on the catalyst surface whereby non-selective oxidation reactions occur. In this work, we studied the possibility to decouple the redox mechanism meaning to separate the reactant oxidation step and the catalyst re-oxidation step for the selective oxidation of isobutane (IBAN) to MAC and MAA. For this purpose, two reactor configurations were employed: a periodic reactor and a two-zone fluidized bed reactor (TZFBR). Whereas the periodic reactor allows the temporal separation of the two steps, the TZFBR enables the spatial separation.