Potassium-directed sustainable synthesis of new high silica small-pore zeolite with KFI structure (ZJM-7) as an efficient catalyst for NH3-SCR reaction

High silica small-pore aluminosilicate zeolites such as SSZ-13 have been commercially applied in selective catalytic reduction of NOx with NH3 (NH3-SCR), but their syntheses usually require the use of organic templates, which are environmentally unfriendly. Solution for this problem is sustainable synthesis of high silica small-pore zeolites in the absence of organic templates. One of examples is 8-membered ring aluminosilicate KFI zeolite, which is always Al-rich (Si/Al<4, KFI-4.0) in conventional synthesis. In this report, inspired by high throughput calculations, we successfully prepared new high silica small pore zeolite with KFI structure (Si/Al>5, designated as ZJM-7) in the presence of K+. Interestingly, even after hydrothermal treatment at 850 °C for 12 h, Cu-ZJM-7 catalyst still shows excellent performance in the NH3-SCR reaction. The combination of sustainable synthesis and excellent catalytic properties of ZJM-7 zeolite might provide a good opportunity for developing highly efficient and low-cost SCR catalysts in the future.