Enhancement of catalytic performance over MOF-808(Zr) by acid treatment for oxidative desulfurization of dibenzothiophene

The development of active oxidative desulfurization (ODS) catalysts is of practical importance. Recently, MOF-808(Zr) has been attempted to use as ODS catalyst due to its various advantages. However, generally MOF-808(Zr) prepared by conventional method was less active in the oxidation reactions due to the lack of defect sites in the structure. In this contribution, we report that the catalytic oxidative performance of MOF-808(Zr) can be enhanced by acid treatment due to the formation of defect sites resulting from the partial removal of organic linkers in the structure. During the experiment, the effect of acid concentration, treatment time, the addition amount of oxidant and reaction parameters on the performance of MOF-808(Zr) was studied. The catalytic results show that MOF-808(Zr) treated with 0.4 M HCl for 1h can catalyze the oxidation of dibenzothiophene completely at 60°C in 15 min. The activity (mole number of converted DBT per hour per unit mass) is 70 mmol h−1 g−1, which is much higher than that (45 mmol h−1 g−1) of parent MOF-808(Zr). In addition, the catalyst can be reused several times without obvious loss of catalytic performance.