Insight into the Acidity and Catalytic Performance on Butane Isomerization of Thermal Stable Sulfated Monoclinic Zirconia
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
In the submitted manuscript, the authors have reported the work, “Insight into the acidity and catalytic performance on butane isomerization of thermal stable sulfated monoclinic zirconia,” which can be accepted as it is. The authors reported the synthesis of sulfated monoclinic zirconia and triclinic zirconia. The synthesized sulfated monoclinic zirconia is characterized using analytical techniques such as powder XRD, FTIR, solid-state NMR, and TEM. Also, they have studied the N2 adsorption-desorption to understand the pore size distribution of the material. In addition, they showed the catalytic activity of sulfated monoclinic zirconia for butane isomerization, which could gain interest to the catalyst chemistry community.
- Main question addressed by the research is Catalyst preparation and its activity for butane isomerization.
- The topic was originally the study of butane isomerization, but similar catalytic studies were known with Al-promoted sulfated zirconia. The authors just addressed the thermostability of the catalyst and isomerization of butane with NMR and other analytical techniques, which I believe is important compared with the other reports.
- This manuscript adds to the subject area compared with other published material Just analytical techniques.
- The authors should add some images which show the reactions, synthesized materials, and catalytic performance with instruments.
- Conclusions is consistent with the evidence and arguments presented and do they address the main question posed
- References are appropriate.
- The authors should correct Figure 7.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
I have gone through the manuscript entitled “Insight into the acidity and catalytic performance on butane isomerization of thermal stable sulfated monoclinic zirconia".
This article seems interesting in terms of the catalytic performance on butane isomerization with synthesized sulfated monoclinic zirconia (M-SZ) with high thermal stability and high were obtained by hydrothermal method followed with sulfation treatment.
This task is a challenging in the chemistry of materials with catalytic activities.
Additionally, I found very interesting the 13C- solid-state NMR experiments in order to study the isomerization of n-butane.
Additionally, 31P- and 13C- solid-state NMR experiments were done in order to study the acidity and catalytic performance in the M-SZ materials reported in this work.
Few questions / points are appended below for further modifications in the current manuscript:
1- Replace “n-butane” for “n-butane”.
2- Add references related to the study of acidity/complexity of the proton networks by 31P and 1H ss-NMR experiment without molecular probes such as TMP or TMPO (i.e. Molecular Catalysis 485 (2020) 110842, not limited to this work).
3- In this sense, how is the 1H ss-NMR spectra (at MAS rates of 10-30 or 60 kHz) for these materials? If the authors cannot speed the sample at high MAS rates 2D 1H-31P HETCOR experiments can be done in order to obtain 1H---31P interactions.
4- The surface chemical compositions of the different M-SZ materials have to be studied by terms of XPS techniques in order to fully characterize the materials.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
