This work investigated influence of ammonia addition in the immersion process of active species on dispersion and activity of copper supported porous hollow silica-alumina spheres catalysts for decomposition of nitrous oxide. The porous hollow sphere support was prepared using surfactant micelles and oil droplets in aqueous solution as dual templates, and active copper species were supported on the resulting hollow spheres via immersion process. Amount of supported copper species on the hollow sphere support tended to increase with increasing amount of aqueous ammonia solution used in the immersion process, suggesting that formation of copper ammine complexes induced strong interactions between the complexes and silica surface from the results of EDS analysis. Specific surface areas and pore volumes of the copper supported hollow spheres tended to increase with increasing the amount of aqueous ammonia solution identified from the result of nitrogen sorption measurements, indicating that the confined active copper species in the nanospaces in the hollow spheres’ shells increased with increasing the amount of aqueous ammonia solution. While, significantly high amount of pores with the diameter of around 3 nm was observed in the copper supported hollow spheres prepared with the amount of aqueous ammonia solution of 2.64 mL from the estimation of their pore size distributions, indicating that the confined active copper species in nanospaces in the shells did not completely plug the pores. The catalytic activity of the copper supported hollow sphere catalyst for decomposition of nitrous oxide depended on the dispersion of the active species, and the catalyst prepared with the amount of aqueous ammonia solution = 2.64 mL exhibited the highest activity and included highly dispersed active copper species even after the catalytic reaction from result of the XRD profiles.

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