Flame spray pyrolysis synthesized Co and Co/Ru based catalysts for the thermochemical GTL - Fischer Tropsch process

Flame spray pyrolysis (FSP) is an innovative technique which allows the production of nanostructured catalysts with several options to control structure and composition even in cases where complex materials need to be prepared. In this paper FSP technique has been used in order to synthesize highly dispersed monometallic and bimetallic Co/Ru catalyst supported on SiO2, active in the Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) - Fischer Tropsch (FT) process. The industrial GTL - FT process converts traditional syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide characterized by a H2/CO molar ratio equal to 2, in hydrocarbons in the range C1 to C100. Two samples of Co and Co-Ru based catalysts supported on silica for CO hydrogenation with 10%wt of Co and 0.1 %wt of Ru were prepared, characterized by BET, SEM, TEM, TPR, XRD and tested at different temperature in a FT bench scale plant using a Packed Bed Reactor (PBR). The experimental results demonstrated that both catalysts are suitable for the GTL - FT process. Increasing the temperature, the CO conversion increases, the product selectivity remains largely unchanged, and the catalyst shows a satisfactory stability as a function of time of stream (TOS). Besides this, the addition of only 0.1 %wt of Ru dramatically changes the performance of the catalyst in terms of CO conversion and C2+ yield