Soft-templating pathway to create nanostructured Mg–Al spinel as high-temperature absorbent for SO 2 Rui Feng • Hamid A. Al-Megren • Zhanquan Zhang • Mohammed C. Al-Kinany • Zifeng Yan • Zhongdong Zhang • Xionghou Gao Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract Interest in reducing SO 2 emission from the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) crude oil has been encour- aging the development of new materials to achieve such goal. The nanostructured Mg–Al spinel (MgAl 2 O 4 ) was prepared by co-precipitation and post hydrothermal treat- ment in the presence of glucose and followed by elimina- tion of the organic components by calcination at 700 °C for 3 h. Physical and chemical properties were characterized by XRD, N 2 sorption, TG, FTIR, SEM, and TEM methods. Mesoporous nanostructured MgAl 2 O 4 with a high surface area of 324 m 2 g -1 were obtained. The organic compo- nents contributed to the development of mesoporosity, functioning as a soft template. SO 2 adsorption tests showed that the nanostructured MgAl 2 O 4 had a 51.58 % increase of SO 2 sorption capacity than MgAl 2 O 4 prepared without glucose. These results showed that the nanostructured MgAl 2 O 4 is a promising candidate as catalyst for flue gas desulfurization in FCC process. Three kinetic models were also applied to analyze the SO 2 adsorption kinetics; the pseudo-second order kinetic model fit well with a corre- lation coefficient (R 2 ) of 0.991 for nanostructured MgAl 2 O 4 . Keywords Nanostructured materials  MgAl 2 O 4 spinel  Specific surface area  Desulfurization  Kinetic model 1 Introduction Magnesium aluminate spinels have been receiving much attention as the important materials due to their unique properties such as high melting point, good mechanical strength, thermal, chemical properties, electronic proper- ties, photonic efficiency, catalysis and sensitivity. [1, 2] These materials have important applications in various areas including fabricating nanodevices, [3] catalyst sup- ports, adsorbents, refractory materials, [4] including sen- sors, [5] photoelectronics, [6] and electronics, [7] catalysts for many reactions, including oxidation of CO and hydro- carbons, and pollution control such as NO x and SO x . For example, due to its strong basicity and the high capacity of SO 2 picking-up, magnesium aluminate oxides have been extensively used as co-catalyst/additives mixing with base fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) catalysts for SO x abatement in FCC units. [8–10] Besides, nanoparticle materials usu- ally exhibit unique chemical properties due to their limited sizes, relatively large surface areas, and high density of corners or edge surface sites. [11] Taking SO 2 abatement in FCC unit for example, the desulfurization efficiency of magnesium aluminate spinels were commonly restricted by Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10934-014-9843-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. R. Feng  Z. Zhang  Z. Yan (&) State Key Laboratory of Heavy Oil Processing, CNPC Key Laboratory of Catalysis, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao 266555, Shandong Province, People’s Republic of China e-mail: zfyancat@upc.edu.cn R. Feng e-mail: feng2007115@163.com H. A. Al-Megren  M. C. Al-Kinany Petrochemicals Research Institute,, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh 11434, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Z. Zhang  X. Gao Lanzhou Petrochemical Research Center, China National Petroleum Corporation, Lanzhou 730060, People’s Republic of China 123 J Porous Mater DOI 10.1007/s10934-014-9843-2