An Investigation Of Gas-liquid Co-feeding High-throughput Reactor And Its Application In Catalysis Reactions

High-throughput catalysis technology is the application of combinatorial methodology in catalysis. Being different from conventional reactors, a high-through- put reactor has many reaction channels, which can test many catalyst candidates simultaneously. If a high-throughput reactor is used, it will save a lot of labor and time. Hence, this kind of reactors is especially useful in catalysis investigation. In the present research, a novel parallel fixed-bed flow through high-throughput reactor was designed and constructed. This parallel reactor can be fed with both gas and liquid reactants simultaneously. It can be used to investigate all types of gas-solid catalysis reactions.The reactor system comprises a liquid distribution system, a gas splitter, and a parallel reactor body. The liquid distribution system could divide one stream of liquid flow into 36 equal streams (6×6). The gas splitter could split one stream of gas flow to 36 equal streams (6×6). The reactor has 36 reaction channels, which could test 36 catalysts each time.The N-methylation of aniline with dimethyl ether was used as the test reaction to verify the feasibility of the high-throughput reaction system. After tested, the reactor system gave results based on aniline conversions of about±10% errors among channels. Only one of the reactor channels gave a relative error of 13%. This channel was not used in the later testing of catalysts. After proving that our parallel reactor could give meanful results, the reactor was used to investigate catalysts with different supports and different active phases. In the investigation, HZSM-5,γ-Al2O3, SiO2, SBA-15, HY, Silica gel, and Silica-Alumina gel were tested as catalyst supports, while Cr2O3, MnO2, Fe2O3, CoO, NiO, CuO, ZnO, Ag, Bi2O3, and CdO were tested as the active phases for aniline methylation. ZnO/HZSM-5(Si/Al=40) was proved to be the best catalyst. The catalyst life time and catalytic reaction conditions of ZnO/HZSM-5 (Si/Al=40) were investigated in detail. More than 20% of aniline conversion with 99.8% of N-methylaniline selectivity was obtained over 9.1wt%ZnO/HZSM-5(Si/Al= 40).