Propylene, as one of the most important building blocks of petrochemicals, has huge global demands far from being met by conventional propylene production through steaming cracking and catalytic cracking of naphtha. Methanol to olefins (MTO), as a competitive nonpetroleum route to produce light olefins, draws considerable attention since the low-cost coal or natural gas can be easily converted to methanol.However, the product distribution of ethylene and propylene over them is close. Recently, our group led by Prof. Dr. TIAN Peng and Prof. Dr. LIU Zhongmin synthesized a small-pore SAPO-14 molecular sieve (AFN topology) with an ultra-small cage structure and a narrow 8-membered ring (8-MR) channel system, over which the propylene selectivity can rise to as high as 77.3% with a high methanol conversion.

This work published inACS Catalysison February 26.

This work was supported by National Science Foundation of China (No. 21476228, 21676262 91745109 and 21991091) and Key research project of frontier science of CAS (QYZDB-SSW-JSC040).(Text by WANG Ye, and figure by GAO Mingbin)

High Propylene Selectivity in Methanol Conversion over a Small-Pore SAPO Molecular Sieve with Ultra-Small Cage. Miao Yang, Bing Li, Mingbin Gao, Shanfan Lin, Ye Wang, Shutao Xu, Xuebin Zhao, Peng Guo, Yingxu Wei, Mao Ye, Peng Tian*, Zhongmin Liu*, ACS Catal., 10(6):3741-3749, 2020.