Isolated Fe(III)–O Sites Catalyze the Hydrogenation of Acetylene in Ethylene Flows under Front-End Industrial Conditions

The
search for simple, earth-abundant, cheap, and nontoxic metal
catalysts able to perform industrial hydrogenations is a topic of
interest, transversal to many catalytic processes. Here, we show that
isolated FeIII–O sites on solids are able to dissociate
and chemoselectively transfer H2 to acetylene in an industrial
process. For that, a novel, robust, and highly crystalline metal–organic
framework (MOF), embedding FeIII–OH2 single
sites within its pores, was prepared in multigram scale and used as
an efficient catalyst for the hydrogenation of 1% acetylene in ethylene
streams under front-end conditions. Cutting-edge X-ray crystallography
allowed the resolution of the crystal structure and snapshotted the
single-atom nature of the catalytic FeIII–O site.
Translation of the active site concept to even more robust and inexpensive
titania and zirconia supports enabled the industrially relevant hydrogenation
of acetylene with similar activity to the Pd-catalyzed process.