(360g) Practical Methods for Screening Catalyst for Reforming Applications

Steam reforming of hydrocarbons to produce syngas and/or hydrogen is an established technology with a long history at Air Products. Although the basic technology has not changed very much in decades, new challenges have risen in producing these products from ever heavier hydrocarbon feedstocks and in using compact onsite hydrogen generators such as Air Products PRISM^® Hydrogen Generator Units (PHG Units) to deliver hydrogen directly to customers.

While a fundamental understanding of catalysis processes and the use of detailed models are very useful for aiding process design and shortening process development cycles, the idealized assumptions implicit in such theory and models can miss nuanced, though consequential, differences in actual catalyst performance. For example, two nominally equivalent catalysts can produce substantially different results in the field due to variations in performance arising from slightly different manufacturing, preparation, and/or activation techniques. The diagnosis of such differences is often made more difficult by the fact that the detailed properties of these materials may not be known and that the complete characterization of proprietary third-party materials may be restricted by agreement, making a deep fundamental understanding of the specific catalyst properties often untenable. Furthermore, in an industrial setting, there is always a trade-off between the need for a timely cost-effective solution and a thorough in-depth understanding of the fundamentals of the problem. In light of these factors, we have developed a practical approach to evaluating catalysts and for characterizing their performance under the same conditions used in plants. By using the actual catalysts under the actual plant conditions and by subjecting these catalysts to the same kinds of excursions seen in real operation, we can observe the same phenomena and reproduce the same limiting behaviors. Although these methods do not always completely expose the fundamental reasons for any observed differences, they do provide a nice compromise between exploring the problem with sufficient depth to obtain understanding and providing results to inform catalyst selection (or screening), process design, and plant operation decisions.