(448d) High Throughput Experimentation (Hte) Applied to Methanol-to-Hydrocarbons Reactions

In a broader context, we describe in our presentation High Throughput Experimentation (HTE) as an efficient tool for research and development in the field of petrochemical applications. Besides the generation of reproducible and precise screening results under relevant process conditions, the scale down of catalyst synthesis procedures is likewise a prerequisite of HTE. The example of methanol-to-hydrocarbons serves as case study. This reaction is, like Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, a route to make olefins (MTO), gasoline (MTG) or diesel (MTD) based on synthesis gas. Current state-of-the-art catalysts for MTO and MTG are SAPO-34 and ZSM-5 based catalysts. The catalyst activity, time-on-stream deactivation and hydrocarbon selectivity depend on the topology as well as the number and strength of acid sites in micro- and mesoporous materials. ChevronTexaco is actively developing new micro-and mesoporous materials and is interested to identify the activity and selectivity in chemical reactions as early as possible. hte Aktiengesellschaft developed a 16-fold parallel fixed bed reactor test rig to measure the activity and selectivity of as little as 100 mg material. The process control guarantees constant pressure, flow, feed concentration and temperature for very long run-times (1 ? 16 weeks) and allows sequential start-up of the reactors and product analysis, i.e. catalyst with different deactivation time-scales can be compared at constant time-on-stream. This robust technology has now also been expanded by hte to more complex workflows such as hydrodesulfurisation (HDS) and other Gas-to-Liquids reactions such as methanol synthesis and FT synthesis.