High-Visible-Light Photoactivity of Plasma-Promoted Vanadium Clusters on Nanozeolites for Partial Photooxidation of Methanol

Cold VCl3–plasma is employed for the preparation of highly dispersed vanadium oxide clusters on nanosized zeolite. Different types of zeolites, such as EMT, FAU (z.X), and Beta, are used. The activity of the prepared catalysts is studied in the selective photooxidation of methanol under polychromatic visible and UV irradiations. The physicochemical properties and catalytic performance of plasma-treated zeolite Beta (P-V2O5@Beta) catalyst is compared with zeolite Beta (V2O5@Beta) and amorphous silica (V2O5@SiO2) impregnated vanadium oxide catalysts. Pure V2O5 is used as a reference material. The set of catalytic data shows that plasma-prepared zeolite Beta based catalyst displays the highest activity. Complementary characterization techniques including XRD, N2-sorption, FTIR, ionic exchange, pyridine adsorption, Raman, NMR, TPR, and EDX-TEM are used to study the impact of the preparation approach on the physicochemical properties and catalytic performance of photocatalysts.