Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We have studied the oxidation of carbon monoxide over a lanthanum substituted perovskite (La0.5Sr0.5CoO3-d) catalyst prepared by spray pyrolysis. Under the assumption of a first-order kinetics mechanism for CO, it has been found that the activation energy barrier of the reaction changes from 80 to 40 kJ mol-1 at a threshold temperature of ca. 320 oC. In situ XPS near-ambient pressure ( 0.2 torr) shows that the gas phase oxygen concentration over the sample decreases sharply at ca. 300 oC. These two observations suggest that the oxidation of CO undergoes a change of mechanism at temperatures higher than 300 oC.