An aerosol reactor for the controlled synthesis of heterogeneous catalyst particles

Abstract

AbstractCommercialized catalysts are often needed in multiton quantities for industrial deployment. Although scalable, manufacturing methods to produce catalysts at quantity often produce materials with an ensemble of physical and chemical characteristics. This work explores an aerosol reactor to synthesize homogeneous, uniform catalyst materials in order to develop correlations between key chemical and physical characteristics and their resulting catalytic performance. With these insights, we optimize reactor processing conditions to engineer particles with the desired physical and chemical characteristics to produce enhanced performance catalysts. Control over several process parameters, including reactor residence time, temperature, precursor type, and precursor composition, allows for the rational determination of key physical and chemical characteristics on the resulting catalyst materials and enables process optimization to engineer catalysts with enhanced performance. To demonstrate the methodology, the aerosol reactor was used to synthesize and optimize WO x catalyst materials for the isomerization and metathesis of a 2‐butene feed into propylene.