Abstract
Solid “oxygen reservoirs,” such as doped ceria, can be successfully applied in a novel process for the oxidative dehydrogenation of propane. The ceria lattice oxygen selectively burns hydrogen from the dehydrogenation mixture at 550 °C. This gives three key advantages: it shifts the dehydrogenation equilibrium to the desired product side, generates heat in situ, which aids the endothermic dehydrogenation, and simplifies product separation. We have applied a genetic algorithm to screen doped cerias for their performance in the selective hydrogen oxidation. Three generations of doped ceria catalysts (61 catalysts in total), were synthesised. Dopants were chosen from a set of 26 elements, and with a maximum of two dopants per catalyst, at five different concentrations. The catalyst performance (activity and selectivity), is expressed by a fitness value. Each generation shows a higher average fitness value. The dopant type has a large effect on the catalyst fitness. We identified six dopant atoms which lead to selective hydrogen combustion catalysts, namely bismuth (Bi), chromium (Cr), copper (Cu), potassium (K), manganese (Mn), lead (Pb) and tin (Sn) (“good” dopants). Analysis of the effect of electronegativity, ionic radius and dopant concentration shows that most elements yielding a high fitness have electronegativities ranging from 1.5–1.9. Generally, the properties of catalysts containing two dopants can be predicted from the behaviour of singly doped ones. Synergy does occur for certain copper‐, iron‐ and platinum‐containing catalysts. The addition of calcium (Ca) or magnesium (Mg) to copper‐doped catalysts doubles the activity, and the selectivity of iron doped catalysts can be improved by adding chromium (Cr), manganese (Mn) or zirconium (Zr). Importantly, the doped cerias show a high stability in the redox cycling, much higher than that of supported oxides. A Cr‐ and Zr‐doped catalyst (Ce~0.90~Cr~0.05~Zr~0.05~O~2~) was highly selective and active over 250 redox cycles (a total of 148 h on stream), with no phase segregation or change in particle size.