Liquid-phase catalytic hydrodechlorination of chlorinated organic compounds in a continuous flow micro-packed bed reactor over a Pd/AC catalyst

Catalytic hydrodechlorination (HDC) is considered to be a safe and effective method to treat chlorinated organic pollutants and has always been a hot spot in basic catalysis research. It is difficult to obtain excellent catalytic performance due to the inferior mass transfer performances of traditional batch reactors, and the deactivation of catalysts can easily occur due to the poisoning effect of HCl. In this work, Pd catalysts supported on activated carbon (Pd/AC) were synthesized by the ion-exchange (IE) method. The characterization results of N2 physisorption, XRD, TEM and XPS revealed that the active Pd components were uniformly dispersed on the surface of AC in the form of nanoparticles. A continuous flow system based on a micro-packed bed reactor (μPBR) was developed for the hydrodechlorination, and the hydrogenation of chlorobenzene (CB) was selected as the model reaction. With the optimal reaction conditions, a conversion and selectivity of 100% were obtained. Importantly, no obvious deactivation of the catalysts was observed during a 100 h time-on-stream test. Moreover, Pd/AC catalysts exhibited remarkable substrate suitability in dechlorination systems. The reaction kinetics for hydrodechlorination of CB in methanol was investigated after the internal and external diffusion limitations were eliminated.