Effect of hydrothermal environment on Cu-ZnO/Al2O3 catalyst for hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol

The hydrogenation of CO2 to methanol not only lessens CO2 emission but also relieves energy shortage, and CuZnO/Al2O3 catalyst has been found to have excellent activity. However, there is a large amount of water generated in CO2 hydrogenation, which causes the catalyst to be in severe hydrothermal environment during the reaction, and then leads to the deactivation of catalyst. And the effect of hydrothermal environment on Cu-ZnO/ Al2O3 for CO2 hydrogenation to methanol is often neglected. In this work, the catalyst Cu-ZnO/Al2O3 was prepared by coprecipitation method, and then was underwent hydrothermal treatments with different times and temperatures. After that, the changes of catalyst structures and surface properties due to the hydrothermal treatments were studied in detail by various characterization technologies. At last, these catalysts were used in CO2 hydrogenation into methanol to show the effect of hydrothermal treatments on catalytic activity and selectivity.