Influence of hydrogen treatment on SCR catalysts: Advancement report

Municipal waste flue gas was previously found to deactivate the Pt-based CO oxidation catalyst severely. In the specific case studied, siloxanes were found to cause the deactivation. An on-site method for complete regeneration of the catalysts activity was found without shutdown of the flue gas stream, i.e. by in situ treatment of the Pt-catalyst by reductive H2-gas.

However, the introduction of H2 gas in the gas stream could also affect other units in the tail pipe gas cleaning system. Of special interest in this study is the effect of hydrogen gas on the performance of the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) process, i.e. the catalytic removal of NOx from the flue gas.

A series of experiments was conducted to reveal the impact on the NO SCR activity of a industrial DeNOX catalyst (3%V2O5-7%WO3/TiO2) by treatment of H2. Standard conditions were treatment of the SCR catalyst for 60 min with three different concentrations of H2 (0-2%) in a 8% O2/N2 mixture, where the SCR activity was measured before and after the hydrogen treatment.

The results show that the activity of the SCR catalyst is only negligible affected during exposure to the H2/O2 gas and in all cases it returned reversibly to the initial NOx conversion (temporarily higher) after reexposure to the standard NO SCR gas. Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) suggests that a fraction of both V(IV) and V(V) were reduced to V(III) during exposure to 2% H2 + 8% O2.

However, the distribution of vanadium in oxidation state V(III)-V(V) quickly returned to the initial after the hydrogen treatment, emphasizing the reversibility of the vanadia system.