Highly efficient catalytic CO oxidation by balancing the crystal and mesoporous structure of Ta2O5 carrier combined with cobalt

Because the combination of Co and common support (Al, Ti, et al.) usually shows poor catalytic activity, tantalum has been introduced for CO conversion as a novel carrier due to the excellent performance. In this work, Co3O4 was loaded on four forms of tantalum support (amorphous, mesoporous, crystalline and crystalline mesoporous, abbreviated as Co/Ta-am, Co/Ta-me, Co/Ta-cry and Co/Ta-cm, respectively). And among these four states, Co/Ta-cm presents the highest CO conversion rate. The temperature of 90% CO conversion rate of Co/Ta-cm is approximately 130 degrees C at the high space velocity of 780,000 h-1, which is 70%, 82% and 88% higher than that of Co/Ta-cry, Co/Ta-me and Co/Ta-am, respectively. Moreover, the characteristics of the catalyst have been studied by XRD, SEM, BET, TGA, and H2-TPR, and the results reveal that Co/Ta-cm has the excellent crystallinity and stability, and the morphology is regular. X-ray photon spectroscopy and in-situ diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTs) have been performed to investigate the reaction mechanism, which indicates that Co3+ is the active component and lattice oxygen plays a critical role in CO oxidation.