Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Chem. Pap. DOI 10.1007/s11696-017-0336-z ORIGINAL PAPER VO x /Zr–SBA‑15 catalysts for selective oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde Yadolah Ganjkhanlou 1  · Zdeněk Tišler 2  · José Miguel Hidalgo 2  · Karel Frolich 1  · Jiří Kotera 1  · Pavel Čičmanec 1  · Roman Bulánek 1   Received: 1 July 2017 / Accepted: 2 November 2017 © Institute of Chemistry, Slovak Academy of Sciences 2017 products (acetaldehyde). Catalytic data also reveal that oli- gomeric/polymeric tetrahedrally coordinated vanadium spe- cies exhibit higher activity in ethanol oxidative dehydroge- nation than monomeric complexes. In addition, comparison of the catalytic performance of VO x /Zr–SBA-15 catalysts with VO x /SBA-15 catalysts showed that catalytic properties of VO x /Zr–SBA-15 catalysts can be tuned by incorporation of controlled amount of zirconium into silica framework. Keywords Mesoporous Silica · Oxidative dehydrogenation · Ethanol · Zirconia · Acetaldehyde Introduction Research and development of green routes to base chemicals attract attention of academia and industry as it contributes to improving the sustainability of the chemical technologies. Acetaldehyde production via the oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) of bio-ethanol, whose production has signifcantly increased over the past years, results in a drop in its price and increased availability, eliminating most of the disadvantages of the present production by Wacker process. This method is a promising alternative for acetaldehyde production; however, additional research is needed for fnding practical catalyst (higher ODH activity and reliable catalyst chemical and physical stability) for industrialization of the process (Andrushkevich et al. 2017; Tesser et al. 2004). Apart from precious metal-based catalysts, supported vanadium catalysts have been investigated in selective oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde. Surface vanadium oxide species, VO x , demonstrate high efficiency for this reaction, which is strongly tunable by the nature of a support (Andrushkevich et al. 2017; Beck et al. 2012; Čičmanec et al. 2017; Lakshmi et al. 2001, 1999). Higher Abstract Efect of zirconium presence in the silica frame- work and content and speciation of vanadium surface oxo- complexes on the catalytic behavior of VO x /Zr–SBA-15 catalysts in oxidative dehydrogenation of ethanol was inves- tigated. Experimental results bring evidence of successful incorporation of zirconium into ordered mesoporous silica framework with the preservation of ordered mesoporosity by hydrothermal template base synthesis method. The presence of zirconium in the SBA-15 framework increases reducibil- ity of vanadium species and acidity of the catalysts. It is refected in higher activity of vanadium species expressed as turn-over frequency (e.g., TOF of 20 h −1 for 5%VO x / Zr–SBA-15 sample in comparison with TOF of 12 h −1 for 5%VO x /SBA-15 sample) and also in signifcant decrease of selectivity to acetaldehyde (65% in comparison with 90% for mentioned samples) followed by increase in selectivity to ethylene (25% in comparison with 5%). This change in distribution of reaction products is related to stronger acid- ity character of surface OH groups and inhibition efect of formed water vapours on the oxidative dehydrogenation This work was presented at the 44th International Conference of Slovak Society of Chemical Engineering held in Demänovská Dolina, Slovak Republic on May 22–26, 2017. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11696-017-0336-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Yadolah Ganjkhanlou yadolah.ganjkhanlou@upce.cz 1 Department of Physical Chemistry, Faculty of Chemical Technology, University of Pardubice, Studentská 573, 532 10 Pardubice, Czech Republic 2 Unipetrol Centre for Research and Education/UNICRE, Areál Chempark, Záluží 1, 436 70 Litvínov, Czech Republic