ITQ Severo Ochoa Lecture «Catalyst Deactivation & Regeneration. A Question of Life and Death» – Prof. Jean-Pierre Gilson
🎓 ITQ Severo Ochoa Lecture
El próximo martes 13 de mayo contaremos con el Prof. Jean-Pierre Gilson – Distinguished Professor, Emeritus. Laboratory of Catalysis & Spectrochemistry (LCS), ENSICAEN, Caen (France) – quien impartirá la charla «Catalyst Deactivation & Regeneration. A Question of Life and Death».
- Martes 13 de mayo de 2025 (12:00h)
- Salón de Actos del ITQ (UPV-CSIC)
«Catalyst Deactivation & Regeneration. A Question of Life and Death»
Together with activity and selectivity, stability is one of the three parameters characterizing the properties of a given catalyst. It is often neglected by academia (we are all very proud to report very high TOF and TON without discussing how long they last or how long it takes to reach them, respectively…) while, in fact, it determines the reactor design when considered a promising key component of an industrial process. It will also strongly impact the overall process economics by setting acceptable or unacceptable lower limits on the STY (Space Time Yield, i.e. productivity directly influencing the capital investment).
After giving a description of the various ways catalysts, in particular zeolite based, may deactivate, I will concentrate on ways to mitigate or to live with the problem. The key will be to first assess whether the deactivation process is fatal, i.e. the catalysts deteriorate beyond repair, or reversible and therefore design a regeneration procedure. A special focus will be paid to deactivation by coking (i.e. large polyaromatics immobilized on active sites or blocking access to the porous network where they are located) and regeneration of “coked” catalysts. In some cases, catalyst deactivation has a positive effect as in the “selectivation” of zeolite catalysts where selectivity increases while the catalyst activity decreases marginally by coke laydown, but its selectivity increases substantially. In other cases, the real catalyst is not only the inorganic material (e.g. SAPO-34 in MTO) but a hybrid between this material and organic species produced during the early stages of the catalyst life.
Coking can also be mitigated by catalyst engineering during their synthesis: for instance, nanometer-sized zeolites tend to coke like micrometer-sized zeolites, but their coke seems to be preferentially laid on the external/mesoporous surface where it is easier to be removed by combustion under much milder conditions.
The special case of oxygenated molecules processing in the framework of a greener chemistry will be illustrated with the example of anisole processing.
There is still much to be done in this field of catalysis, especially in the fundamentals of deactivation and the rewards will be important as they will decide upon the life and death of catalytic processes.
