(509o) Development Of A Laboratory Scale Catalytic Cracking Reactor

Conversion of lipids into fuels can be accomplished through heterogeneous catalytic cracking to form diesel and gasoline range fuels. However, analysis of cracked compounds, which are both gases and liquids at standard temperature and pressure, can be tedious and cumbersome. In this work, a Varian 3600 GC coupled with a Saturn quadrupole ion trap mass spectrometer was used to perform mass spectral analysis in real-time as lipids were passed over a bed of highly acidic ZSM-5 catalyst. As this was an integrated reactor/analyzer, the Rxi-1ms GC column was exposed in the inlet to temperatures in excess of 400°C. This temperature is beyond the degradation point of the column, and so selective ion storage RF waveform was used to remove the siloxane masses m/z (207, 281, and 355) from the spectra. This produced lower detection limits and full scan data for identification. Electron impact spectra were segmented to analyze for different mass-charge ranges (i.e. lower molecular weight compounds eluting at the front could be scanned from m/z 10 to 50 for 10 minutes and then m/z 50 to 425 for the remainder of the run to analyze higher molecular weight compounds). Selected ejection chemical ionization was used to confirm the molecular weight of reaction products. Hexane was reacted over H-ZSM-5 catalyst for instrument validation. This produced a series of alkanes and alkenes with distributions consistent with that reported for the cracking of hexane.