Catalytic Performance of Amorphous Ti/SiO₂ in the Gas-Phase Epoxidation of Propylene with H₂O₂

The epoxidation of propylene with dilute H2O2 aqueous solution over titanium silicalite-1 (TS-1) zeolite catalyst is a green chemical reaction for propylene oxide (PO) production. Carrying out the reaction in gas-phase can get rid of problems caused by using methanol solvent. This paper reports an attempt of using non-zeolite catalyst for the gas-phase epoxidation. Amorphous Ti/SiO2, obtained by grafting amorphous SiO2 with TCl4 in ethanol solvent in a chemical liquid-phase deposition (CLD) process, has been used as the catalyst. Results show that the CLD Ti/SiO2 with appropriate Si/Ti molar ratio is an active catalyst for gas-phase epoxidation, achieving 9.8 % propylene conversion and 66.9 % PO selectivity with 40.3 % H2O2 utilization, which indicates that this amorphous Ti/SiO2 catalyst deserves extensive studies in the future.