Van Everbroeck, Tim

Abstract: One of the big problems with gasoline-powered cars is that the exhaust gas contains pollutants which are detrimental for human health and the environment. For this reason cars are equipped with a three-way catalytic converter which has the function to convert carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides (NOx) to molecules that are not harmful for human health. The materials that are used to do this are the platinum group metals (PGMs), platinum, palladium and rhodium, which are very rare, expensive, critical raw materials. The increasing demand for new cars and progressively stricter emission standards drives the price even higher. So, there is a need to reduce the amount of PGMs in three-way catalytic converters and replace them by materials that are more common and cheap. A good candidate to do this is copper oxide (CuO) because it is common and shows some catalytic activity. While it is not as active as the PGMs it can be used in much larger quantities for compensation. To keep the CuO particles small, which is more efficient, they need to be supported on a material with a large surface area. Furthermore, the catalytic activity can be altered by interactions with other materials. For this thesis CuO is deposited on different support materials such as alumina, titania and ceria. The catalytic performance of the final materials are evaluated against its characteristics. Another part of the research focuses on the precipitation of copper with other elements is to obtain intimate mixtures of metal oxides and mixed metal oxides. The spinel-type materials are evaluated against pure CuO to find synergies between the different elements. A final study makes use of layered double hydroxides to obtain mixtures of metal oxides and mixed metal oxides. Again, we evaluate how certain properties and elements in the composition affect the catalytic performance. At the end of the thesis the conclusions are presented and the developed materials are compared to a commercial three-way catalyst. Furthermore, the limitations of this work are discussed and an outlook on the future of the automotive industry is presented and how the developed materials can play a role in this

Copper-based critical raw material-free three-way catalysts : an exploration of supports and synergies

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