THE MECHANISM OF THE ETHANE HYDROGENOLYSIS - A RECONSIDERATION OF SOME KINETIC DATA

In order to justify the deduction made previously from isokinetic effects of ethane hydrogenolysis, i.e., that the rate determining step of this reaction on Pt and Ni is the C-C bond breaking of the chemisorbed C2H5 unit, some kinetic data from literature are scrutinized. It turns out that the variation of the observed rate with ethane and/or hydrogen pressure is such as predicted by the simple mechanism C2H5* + H* + n* --> CH3* + CH3* + n*, where n means the number of free sites (*) involved. From an analysis of the kinetic data is shown that n = 1.