Analyzing Catalyst Deactivation with a Packed Bed Reactor
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Date
2017-12
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
As the global demand for industrial and consumer products has increased in recent years, so too has the need for robust and high-performance catalysts to support this need. In particular, heterogeneous catalysts have proven to be versatile and economically feasible solutions to this problem. Organosilane catalysts have been studied for their ability to catalyze reactions that convert abundant biomolecular feedstocks such as cellulose and glucose to more valuable products used in the polymer, energy and fine chemical industries. However, one issue that these catalysts, like many others, encounter is catalyst deactivation, where the active sites on the catalyst support degrade or leach off over time as a reaction proceeds. My work focuses on designing a continuous-flow packed bed reactor to study the deactivation of a tertiary amine functionalized mesoporous catalyst for the isomerization of glucose to fructose. An accurate and reliable reactor would have to satisfy several design considerations. Namely, the reactor must maintain a constant temperature with no temperature gradient throughout the reactor, have no interruption in flow rate of reactants, and must completely immobilize catalyst particles within the catalyst bed. Several key strategies are implemented to achieve these goals, and the final design was able to identify several potential deactivation mechanisms that are occurring in the tertiary amine catalyst. Continued analysis in the future could identify the most impactful deactivation mechanism(s), and could lead to a more efficient approach to creating better catalysts by targeting the identified weaknesses.
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Keywords
Catalyst deactivation, Packed Bed Reactor, Catalysis, Reactor Design, Organosilane