| Deactivation of fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) catalysts is mainly associated with carbonaceous deposits or coke formation. Coke yield is a key measurement of catalyst performance and often used in catalyst selection. Many factors influence the coke formation such as structure and composition of catalyst, and operating conditions, thus a large parameter space will have to be explored to identify the best coke resistant catalyst as well as optimum operating condition to minimize coke formation. However, the existing methods for heterogeneous catalyst evaluations are limited by low throughput, meaning each time only one catalyst or one experiment condition can be tested. Barcodes have been used ubiquitously to tag products, but common barcodes that are attached on exteriors of packages are not suitable for catalyst evaluation. There is an unmet need to develop a new type of barcodes that can be used to label each catalyst bead, and a group of catalysts will then be able to be evaluated simultaneously to save time and effort.;The main objective of my research was to establish a high-throughput catalyst evaluation system based on thermal barcodes, in which a selected panel of phase change nanoparticles (PCM) was embedded into catalyst pellets. Owing to sharp melting peak of phase change nanoparticles and large temperature range of thermal analysis, the labeling capacity of thermal barcodes was greatly increased to over millions, sufficiently to evaluate a large number of catalysts in one batch of reaction. The thermal barcodes have been used to test coke formation for catalyst evaluation. After reaction, coke formation was tested by thermo-gravimetric analysis and the thermal barcode was decoded with a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC). Items like heat transfer, interaction among catalyst and PCM particles, and gas diffusion have been studied to exam the feasibility of the high-throughput screening method. |
