Ti-Doping in Silica-Supported PtZn Propane Dehydrogenation Catalysts: From Improved Stability to the Nature of the Pt–Ti Interaction

[Image: see text] Propane dehydrogenation is an important industrial reaction to access propene, the world’s second most used polymer precursor. Catalysts for this transformation are required to be long living at high temperature and robust toward harsh oxidative regeneration conditions. In this work, combining surface organometallic chemistry and thermolytic molecular precursor approach, we prepared well-defined silica-supported Pt and alloyed PtZn materials to investigate the effect of Ti-doping on catalytic performances. Chemisorption experiments and density functional calculations reveal a significant change in the electronic structure of the nanoparticles (NPs) due to the Ti-doping. Evaluation of the resulting materials PtZn/SiO(2) and PtZnTi/SiO(2) during long deactivation phases reveal a stabilizing effect of Ti in PtZnTi/SiO(2) with a k(d) of 0.015 h(–1) compared to PtZn/SiO(2) with a k(d) of 0.022 h(–1) over 108 h on stream. Such a stabilizing effect is also present during a second deactivation phase after applying a regeneration protocol to the materials under O(2) and H(2) at high temperatures. A combined scanning transmission electron microscopy, in situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy, electron paramagnetic resonance, and density functional theory study reveals that this effect is related to a sintering prevention of the alloyed PtZn NPs in PtZnTi/SiO(2) due to a strong interaction of the NPs with Ti sites. However, in contrast to classical strong metal–support interaction, we show that the coverage of the Pt NPs with TiO(x) species is not needed to explain the changes in adsorption and reactivity properties. Indeed, the interaction of the Pt NPs with Ti(III) sites is enough to decrease CO adsorption and to induce a red-shift of the CO band because of electron transfer from the Ti(III) sites to Pt(0).