and the same trend for selectivity to toluene and xylene was observed, the figure only rising from 33.5% to 34.3% and 49.4% to 50.5%,
respectively. At low WHSV, the contact time of reactants and catalyst was long which enhanced the side reactions such as
disproportionation, isomerization and depth alkylation [32]. Moreover, as for the MTO reaction, the low WHSV could increase the
possibility for the formation of high olefins, which resulted in the low conversion of benzene and selectivity to xylene [33]. Therefore,
the increase of WHSV in optimum value, to some extent, could help to suppress the side reactions and improve the benzene conversion
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1
and xylene selectivity. However, further increasing the WHSV to 8 h , the contact time of reactants and catalyst was too short to react,
which limited the alkylation of benzene and toluene, and led to the low benzene conversion and selectivity to xylene. In order to obtain
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1
the high yield of xylene, The WHSV of 4 h was considered as the optimum. After the optimization of above conditions, the yield of
xylene was increased from 21.1% to 41.4% which significantly improve the economic benefit of the alkylation process. According to
-
1
-1
the literature, the optimal WHSV of 2 h was mainly reported over the conventional ZSM-5 [27, 34] while 4 h in this work, this was
because of the fact that the introduction of mesoporous promoted the diffusion of bulky reactants in the reaction of benzene alkylation
with methanol [6].
For better comparison, the commercial conventional ZSM-5 and high-silica microporous ZSM-5(Si/Al = 1800) were also tested. As
shown in Figs. S5 and S6 in Supporting information, the benzene conversion and selectivity to xylene over the high-silica hierarchical
porous ZSM-5 were much higher than the other two catalysts. These were because of the optimized acidity and the diffusion effect of
the hierarchical porous structure [10-12, 14, 35], which could be investigated in the results of nitrogen adsorption-desorption, NH
and Py-IR (Figs. S2-S4 in Supporting information).
3
-TPD
4
. Conclusion
The high-silica hierarchical porous ZSM-5 was synthesized by sol-gel method for benzene alkylation with methanol to xylene. The
effects of temperature, pressure, benzene/methanol molar ratio and weight hour space velocity (WHSV) on the catalytic performance of
catalyst were investigated. Consequently, the high-silica hierarchical porous ZSM-5 showed great performance with the yield of xylene
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1
was up to 41.1% under the optimum reaction conditions (500 °C, 0.1 MPa, Mbenzene/Mmethanol = 1:1.5 and WHSV = 4 h ), while the yield
to by-products of ethylbenzene was well suppressed (below 0.1%). This could be ascribed to the fact that the high-silica hierarchical
porous ZSM-5 catalyst with appropriate Brönsted acidity for benzene alkylation with methanol suppressed the side reactions of methanol,
and the hierarchical porous structure promoted the diffusion of alkyl aromatics.
Acknowledgment
We acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. NSFC-21476207 and NSFC-
2
1506189) and National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, No. 2011CB710800).
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