Day: April 2, 2012

Dady B. Dadyburjor
Department of Chemical Engineering
West Virginia University

Abstract

The Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process converts synthesis gas (syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) to long-chain hydrocarbons in the gasoline, kerosene and/or diesel range at moderate-to-high pressures and temperatures in the presence of a catalyst. The catalysts used consist of multiple metals on a support. Most work in our laboratory has been carried out using iron as the main metal and activated carbon as the support. Chemical promoters such as Mo, K and Cu are often added. FT liquids generally require upgrading before use as fuels, to remove waxes, and to improve the iso-to-normal paraffin ratio. In the first part of this work, we systematically vary the amounts of the metals and the type of support to show the effects of each of these on individual products (e.g., benzene) as well as classes of products (e.g., aromatics). In the second part of this work, we show the effect on the product distribution of adding ZSM-5 zeolite as an upgrading catalyst, either intimately mixed with the FT catalyst, or downstream of it.

Bio: Dr. Dadyburjor is currently Professor of Chemical Engineering at WVU. He served as Department Chair during 1999-2009. His research has been in the areas of sintering and redispersion of supported metal catalysts, coking of cracking catalysts, catalytic direct coal liquefaction, and catalysts for water-gas shift and for the production of high-molecular-weight alcohols and synthesis gas. Prior to arriving at WVU in 1983, he was an Associate Professor and Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a post-doctoral fellow with Eli Ruckenstein at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received his undergraduate degree at IIT, Bombay and his graduate degrees at the University of Delaware. He has participated as a Visiting Professor or Guest Professor at various institutions in this country and overseas: EPFL (Switzerland), Technion (Israel), UC Berkeley, Fritz-Haber-Institut (Berlin), Institute of Coal Chemistry (Taiyuan), and Kitami Institute of Technology (Japan). He has served on the Board of Directors of the North American Catalysis Society and of the Council for Chemical Research, President of the Pittsburgh-Cleveland Catalysis Society, Chair of Area 1b (Kinetics, Catalysis and Reaction Engineering) of AIChE, and Chair of the Division of Petroleum Chemistry of ACS. He is currently on the Visiting Committee of Ohio University and the Editorial Board of Fuel Chemistry and Technology, and is an editor of the ACS journal Energy and Fuels. He was elected a Fellow of AIChE in 1999. In 2007, he was appointed a Resident Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Energy Studies at the National Energy Technology Laboratory of USDOE.