TY - JOUR A1 - Kunkel, B. A1 - Kabelitz, Anke A1 - de Oliveira Guilherme Buzanich, Ana A1 - Wohlrab, S. T1 - Increasing the Efficiency of Optimized V-SBA-15 Catalysts in the Selective Oxidation of Methane to Formaldehyde by Artificial Neural Network Modelling N2 - The present study investigates the possibility of improving the selective oxidation of methane to formaldehyde over V-SBA-15 catalysts in two different ways. In a classical approach of catalyst optimization, the in situ synthesis of V-SBA-15 catalysts was optimized with regard to the applied pH value. Among the set of catalysts synthesized, a higher amount of incorporated vanadium, a higher content of polymeric VOx species as well as a less ordered structure of the support material were observed by increasing the pH values from 2.0 to 3.0. An optimum in performance during the selective oxidation of methane to formaldehyde with respect to activity and selectivity was found over V-SBA-15 prepared at a pH value of 2.5. With this knowledge, we have now evaluated the possibilities of reaction control using this catalyst. Specifically, artificial neural network modelling was applied after the collection of 232 training samples for obtaining insight into the influence of different reaction parameters (temperature; gas hourly space velocity (GHSV); and concentration of O2, N2 and H2O) onto methane conversion and selectivity towards formaldehyde. This optimization of reaction conditions resulted in an outstanding high space-time yield of 13.6 kgCH2O∙kgcat∙h−1 KW - Artificial neural network modelling KW - Selective oxidation KW - Molecular VOx catalysts KW - Formaldehyde PY - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-517420 VL - 10 IS - 12 SP - 1411 PB - MDPI AN - OPUS4-51742 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -