Hollow Zeolites‐Confined Isolated (ZnOH)+ Enable High Selectivity and Stability for Methanol to Aromatics

Abstract The methanol‐to‐aromatics process has great potential to meet the growing global consumption for aromatics, but the widely used metal modified strong acid zeolites, such as Zn/ZSM‐5, usually suffer from unsatisfactory aromatic selectivity and short time‐on‐stream stability. A new Zn/ZSM‐5 based catalyst with only isolated (ZnOH) + species and a cavity core was synthesized by using a new inorganic‐organic hybrid aluminosilicates sphere, which was fabricated with the assistance of electrostatic assembly. Isolated (ZnOH) + species can improve the selectivity to aromatics and minimize the negative influence of diffusion simultaneously. Meanwhile, the core cavity can provide more space to deposit coke. Thus, the prepared HL−Zn(DS)/HZSM‐5 zeolite exhibited the superior aromatics selectivity of 50.63 % with a WHSV of 3.18 h −1 at 390 °C and 0.5 MPa. Moreover, the catalyst can afford an extremely low deactivation constant of 0.0097 mg/h with an enhanced lifetime up to 131 h and strong regeneration ability.