Characteristics and Kinetics of Coked Catalyst Regeneration via Steam Gasification in a Micro Fluidized Bed

Petroleum residue cracking combined coke gasification (RCCG) process was proposed to regenerate the catalyst via coke-steam gasification for syngas production, thus to solve the problem of excessive heat generated via coke combustion in the industrial fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) process. A commercial FCC catalyst and a bifunctional (BF) catalyst were used as the candidates for the RCCG process, and the BF catalyst was specially designed with both catalytic effects of oil cracking and coke gasification. The regeneration characteristics and kinetics of FCC and BF catalysts were studied using a micro fluidized bed. The results showed that high-quality syngas was produced when regenerating the catalysts via steam gasification and the sum of H₂ and CO in the produced gas was over 80 vol % under electrically heated condition.The gasification rate first increased with increasing carbon conversion and then slowly decreased. In comparison with FCC catalyst, the regeneration time of BF catalyst was shortened by more than 30% via addition of alkaline metal oxides and adjustment of its pore size. Homogenous model (HM) and shrinking core model (SCM) were used to calculate the regeneration kinetic parameters of coked catalysts. It was found that the activation energies from these two models were close to each other, while HM had a better fitting relevance for the data than SCM. The activation energy of BF catalyst regeneration was about 115 kJ·mol–¹, lower than that of FCC catalyst (150 kJ·mol–¹), demonstrating that BF catalyst was easier to regenerate via coke gasification and also justified its bifunctional characteristics. The activation energy of coke gasification on BF catalyst could be further decreased to 45 kJ·mol–¹ when introducing 3% oxygen as the gasification reagent.