The reaction kinetics and mechanism of catalytic decomposition of hydrazine nitrate on Ru/C catalyst in nitric acid solutions

Catalytic decomposition of hydrazine nitrate is a very important research topic in the environmental protection field. Herein, we used an Ru/C catalyst for the decomposition of hydrazine nitrate in HNO3, and the reaction kinetics and mechanism were studied in detail. The kinetics study of the decomposition of hydrazine nitrate (0.01 M) was conducted in the temperature range 313–343 K in 0.1 M HNO3 in the presence of Ru/C. The apparent activation energy for this reaction was 46.6 kJ mol−1 according to a fitting of the experimental data, while the reaction order was 1.5. It was also found that the reaction pathway of the catalytic decomposition of hydrazine nitrate on the Ru/C catalyst involved two processes: heterogeneous catalytic disproportionation of hydrazine nitrate at the catalyst surface and oxidation of hydrazine nitrate with catalytically generated HNO2.