China Nonferrous Metallurgy

V₂O₃ has an important application in the preparation of vanadium nitride, ferrovanadium nitride and ferrovanadium. The introduced solution-phase hydrogen reduction (SpHR) can directly prepare V₂O₃ from V-rich solution, which has the advantages of short process, eco-friendliness, and low energy consumption. Low-cost anthraquinone and Ni powder were selected as catalysts to replace PdCl₂ and the products of SpHR with anthraquinone was VO₂(H₂O)_0.5, which showed that V₂O₃ could not be prepared with anthraquinone, and Ni powder precipitated vanadium can obtain the same V₂O₃ product as PdCl₂ (precipitation ratio was 99.87%). The activation energy of SpHR catalyzed by anthraquinone, Ni powder and PdCl₂ were calculated as 188.83kJ/mol, 140.09kJ/mol and 38.07kJ/mol. In the process of catalytic reduction, H₂ molecule was cracked on the surface of Ni or Pd, and formed two Pd—H or Ni—H bonds with strong reducibility, and its s orbital is hybridized with the d orbital of Pd and Ni. The chemisorption energies of Pd and Ni for H₂ were 1.34eV and 2.04eV, respectively. The H₂ was cracked in the range of 250~300℃, and low activation energy of H2 desorption is 9.6994kJ/mol. In this study, Ni powder can be used to replace PdCl₂ to prepare V₂O₃ with purity of 99.21%.