Isolated zinc in mordenite stabilizing carbonylation of dimethyl ether to methyl acetate

Herein, we prepared a series of H-Zn-mordenite (H-Zn-MOR) catalysts by adding zinc source into the initial sols during the synthesis of mordenite (MOR). The results indicated that isolated Zn ions were highly dispersed in the catalysts. The addition of zinc led to the increase of Si/Al in the framework of MOR, the change of the distribution of acid sites and the change of acid strength. We investigated the catalytic performance of the H-Zn-MOR catalysts and the HMOR catalysts for carbonylation of dimethyl ether to methyl acetate. The addition of zinc improved the catalytic performance and made the drop of the conversion over the Zn-0.003 and Zn-0.005 catalysts to be about the half of that over the HMOR catalyst. We attributed it to the change of the acid properties, which further change the rate of coke deposition.