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Upgrading renewables, secondary, and waste streams through innovative hydroprocessing catalysts and reaction pathways


    Problem Statement

    Hydroprocessing is a well-implemented and versatile refinery conversion strategy, comprising a wide array of reaction routes such as: (i) hydrotreating, aiming for the hydrogenation of unsaturated hydrocarbons and the removal (hydrogenolysis) of heteroatoms such as sulfur or nitrogen; (ii) hydrocracking, for promoting C–C bond scission and the partial saturation of aromatics; or (iii) hydrodeoxygenation, for the specific removal of oxygen moieties. In this project, we investigate the conversion of highly polyaromatic feedstock like heavy fuel oil (HFO), pyrolysis fuel oil (PFO), or bio-oils from different biomass sources (i.e., agricultural waste, algae) for quality improvement and obtaining products with higher added value.

    We seek new (thermo-) catalytic strategies and improved heterogeneous catalysts with increased activity and stability. We put advanced analytical characterization techniques (i.e., nuclear magnetic resonance, high-res mass spectrometry) to work and combine their results with modeling and statistical tools.

    HPC

    Goals

    • Develop a quantitative analytical workflow to analyze and interpret these complex reacting environments
    • Explore novel renewable and waste resources to obtain chemicals and fuels
    • Deploy ad-hoc catalysts and process conditions to incorporate these wastes in the refinery (bio- and waste-refinery)
    • Analyze process dynamics and kinetics

    Related People

    Related Publications

    Continuous Lumped Hydrocracking Kinetics of Plastic (Polyethylene) Pyrolysis Oil Blended with Gas Oil

    by Lezcano, Trueba, Rodriguez, Palos, Gutierrez, Castaño
    Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. Year: 2025 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.iecr.5c01838

    Abstract

    The kinetics of coprocessing plastic waste into existing refinery infrastructure is challenging due to the complexity of the composition and its impact on catalyst deactivation. This work investigates the kinetics of cohydrocracking mixtures composed of vacuum gas oil and plastic pyrolysis oil (derived from waste polyethylene pyrolysis) over a NiW/HY catalyst in a laboratory-scale semibatch reactor. We used the continuous lumping approach (based on population balance) for the kinetic modeling, given its flexibility to model the entire product distribution and population dynamics, and incorporated a deactivation function. Deactivation was promoted by longer reaction times (i.e., beyond 0.5 h), heavier feed components (i.e., 350+ °C TBP fraction), and lower temperatures (e.g., 370 °C compared to 440 °C). Two types of expressions were considered for the deactivation function: coke-dependent and agnostic, time-based decay models. Both types of deactivations reproduced the experimental distillation curves, but the time-dependent model led to parameters that align better with expected hydrocracking behavior. Our findings highlight the feasibility of continuous lumped models as a tool for plastic valorization process design and optimization and the necessity of paying attention to the deactivation function to robustify these kinetic models.

    Keywords

    HPC W2C MKM