Revealing the Janus Character of the Coke Precursor in the Propane Direct Dehydrogenation on Pt Catalysts from a kMC Simulation

As the commercial catalyst in the propane direct dehydrogenation (PDH) reaction, one of the biggest challenges of Pt catalysts is coke formation, which severely reduces activity and stability. In this work, a first-principles DFT-based kinetic Monte Carlo simulation (kMC) is performed to understand the origin of coke formation, and an effective method is proposed to curb coke. The conventional DFT calculations give a complete description of the reaction pathway of dehydrogenation to propylene, deep dehydrogenation, and C–C bond cracking. The rate-limiting step is identified as the dissociative adsorption of propane. Moreover, a comparison between different exchange-correlation functionals indicates the importance of van der Waals corrections for the adsorption of propane and propylene. The lateral interactions between the surface adsorbates are significant, which implies that mean field microkinetic modeling might not adequately describe the reaction process. There are two distinct stages in PDH, which are quick deactivation and steady state, respectively, as revealed from the kMC simulation. The precursor of coke mainly formed during the quick deactivation. The calculations indicate that the geometries of the active sites for the dehydrogenation and deep reactions are different. Therefore, the availability of surface sites is a crucial factor in the formation of propylene and side products. The active sites from quick deactivation are mainly occupied by C2/C1 species, which are hard to remove. On the other hand, the surface sites that are left are mainly active toward dehydrogenation to propylene due to the geometry constraint. Therefore, a stable activity and selectivity is reached. Furthermore, the effect of hydrogen molecules in the input stream is also explored. The calculations indicate that the inclusion of hydrogen in PDH reactants not only enhances the forward reactions to the propylene formation but also reduces the consumption of the resulted propylene during the reaction. Therefore, hydrogen is very helpful to the selectivity increase in PDH in addition to other effects. Overall, the current study lays out a solid base for the future optimization of the Pt catalysts in PDH and we propose that the fine control of the surface sites on Pt has paramount importance in reducing coke formation.