Direct synthesis of hydrogen peroxide at additively manufactured fluid guiding elements as structured catalysts

To facilitate the change from a centralized to a decentralized production of H2O2 whilst increasing the overall safety of the production, the direct synthesis of H2O2 is currently being investigated as an interesting alternative to the established anthraquinone auto-oxidation process. However, for this approach a reliable and industrially viable solution is needed to immobilise the catalyst inside the reactor system, thus eliminating the need for cost and time intensive post process removal of the catalyst from the product as it is practiced in current existing slurry reactors. In this work we present a route to coat Pd/TiO2 catalyst onto additively manufactured steel substrates via a simple washcoating process. The resulting structured catalysts show good activity towards the direct synthesis reaction and can be considered stable for the herein investigated process, since they do not show any deactivation during repeated measurements, nor was any mass loss of the coating observed. The sustained catalyst performance and the uniform physical properties of the coatings are attributes of the reliability and reproducibility of the coating process.