Shujuan Kang, Wei Zhou, Qisheng Ma
Apr 1, 2017
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Journal
Chemical Engineering & Technology
Abstract
The presence of SO2 in the methane (CH4) halogenation/chlorination to form methanesulfonyl chloride (CH3SO2Cl, MSC), followed by the catalytic decomposition of MSC to produce methyl chloride (CH3Cl) could effectively prevent deeper reactions of CH3Cl to improve the product selectivity. In this paper, a number of catalytic systems capable of highly-selectively decomposing MSC are studied experimentally. Molecular modeling based on the Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations suggest a bimolecular nucleophilic substitution SN2 reaction mechanism for the catalytic MSC decomposition reaction; and the order of activation energies of different catalytic systems agrees with the laboratory observations.