Impact of Copper Loading on NH 3 -Selective Catalytic Reduction, Oxidation Reactions and N 2 O Formation over Cu/SAPO-34

We developed a procedure for aqueous ion exchange to obtain different Cu loadings of Cu/SAPO-34 (between 0 and 2.6 wt %.) The catalysts were washcoated on monoliths and characterised with respect to their activity and selectivity under standard selective catalytic reduction (SCR), fast SCR, NH 3 oxidation and NO oxidation reactions. They were further characterised using X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET), H 2 -temperature programmed reduction (H 2 -TPR), ultraviolet (UV)-vis spectroscopy and NH 3 adsorption. As expected, activity of all reactions increased with copper loading, due to increased number of active sites. However, the N 2 O formation during standard and fast SCR yielded interesting mechanistic information. We observed that N 2 O formation at low temperature increased with copper loading for the standard SCR reaction, while it decreased for fast SCR. The low-temperature N 2 O formation during fast SCR thus occurs predominantly over Brønsted sites. Species responsible for N 2 O formation during standard SCR, on the other hand, are formed on the copper sites. We further found that the fast SCR reaction occurs to a significant extent even over the H/SAPO-34 form. The Brønsted sites in SAPO-34 are thus active for the fast SCR reaction.