Optimization of the Catalytic Oxidation of Carbon Monoxide by Response Surface Method

The objective of this research is to model and optimize the effective operation parameters of catalytic oxidation of carbon monoxide (CO) using 15 wt.% cobalt-cerium oxide with weight ratio of cobalt to cerium=1.5 supported by multiwalled carbon nanotubes by response surface method. Therefore, 30 sets of experiments were employed to evaluate the influence of the four independent variables including temperature, gas hourly space velocity, O2 concentration, and CO concentration in 5 levels (-2, -1, 0,+1, +2). The experimental design results showed that there is a quadratic model as a functional relationship between CO conversion (response variable) and four independent variables. The data from response surface method explored that CO conversion was highly affected by temperature and O2 concentration. The optimum amounts of the effective parameters for 100% conversion of CO were followed as: temperature= 200 °C, CO concentration =780 ppm, O2 concentration =5.25 vol.%,  and Gas hourly space velocity= 10000 h-1. Analysis of variance with R2 value of 0.9994 showed a satisfactory correlation between the experimental data and predicted values for conversion of carbon monoxide.