Vibrational Spectroscopic Studies of Hydrogen, Carbon-Monoxide and Thiophene Adsorption on Ruthenium-Sulfide and Sulfided Ruthenium Catalysts.

The "working surface" of ruthenium hydrodesulfurization (HDS) catalysts has been modeled by preadsorption of sulfur, carbon and carbon plus sulfur on Ru(0001). Adsorption and decomposition of thiophene over these surfaces have been investigated using TDS/TPRS, XPS and EELS. Thiophene is proposed to decompose via a three-step mechanism involving: (i) initial thiophene cracking at 120 K yielding surface sulfur and hydrocarbon species, (ii) hydrogen desorption near 230 K providing additional decomposition ensembles and (iii) continued decomposition to form "metallocycle -like" intermediates which retain EELS features similar to thiophene. Preadsorbed carbon or carbon plus sulfur are not as effective for passivation of the surface toward metallocycle formation as preadsorbed sulfur alone. This result is attributed to the fact that carbon deposited from butadiene annealed and decomposed at 700 K forms islands, while sulfur establishes a well-ordered superlattice on the surface. The decrease in metallocycle formation with increasing poison levels appears to explain HDS selectivity and specific activity trends observed in our laboratory from mildly sulfided (10% H_2S/H_2 , 673 K, 2h) ruthenium catalysts retaining submonolayers of sulfur. Incoherent inelastic neutron scattering (IINS) has been used to characterize hydrogen adsorption sites on ruthenium sulfide. Hydrogen resides on sulfur anions to form SH groups, yielding two non-degenerate bending modes at 600 and 710 cm^{-1}. Complementary hydrogen adsorption and H_2/D _2 exchange data suggest that the active sites for hydrogen adsorption may be coordinatively unsaturated S-S anion pairs. Comparison of CO adsorption on sulfided Ru/Al _2O_3 to sulfur precovered Ru(0001) reveals an adsorption site related to edge/corner atoms directly perturbed by sulfur, consistent with previous kinetic studies demonstrating higher specific activity for thiophene HDS over smaller ruthenium crystallites.