Vanadium poisoning of FCC catalysts: A quantitative analysis of impregnated and real equilibrium catalysts

Abstract

Amongst the contaminant transition metals Fe, Ni, V that deposits onto the fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) catalyst and promote unwanted secondary reactions, vanadium is the most deleterious one because not only acts as undesired dehydrogenation site but also migrates deeper inside the catalyst particles under the FCC regeneration conditions, stabilizing in different phases that attack the crystalline structure of the catalyst, thus resulting in its irreversible loss of activity. The mechanisms through which vanadium affect the catalyst during its use in the FCC process remain under debate and the accurate determination of the chemical species involved and of their concentration is of paramount importance for the investigations in this field. In this work, a quantification methodology for contaminant vanadium in FCC catalysts was developed based on X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR). A commercial FCC catalyst was artificially contaminated with vanadium at different loads by pore volume impregnation with aqueous vanadyl sulfate solution, in the presence or not of a complexing agent, followed by steam deactivation at 788 °C/5 h, and the samples were compared to spent FCC catalysts from different Brazilian refineries. It has been shown that EPR is a very sensitive and reliable technique to quantify vanadyl ions (V4+) in FCC catalysts while lower valence states such as V3+ have not been detected in any of the samples studied. Vanadyl ions (VO2+) deposited onto the catalyst are mostly oxidized to higher valence state species and the extent of this oxidation in equilibrium catalysts from FCC units was calculated and related to the combustion mode at which the FCC regenerators operate. The artificial vanadium contamination and deactivation protocol adopted in this work resulted in a proportion of V4+/Vtotal of nearly 10%, similar to that of equilibrium catalysts sampled from FCC units with full combustion regeneration. The present study brings a new interpretation for the EPR signal detected as a broad unstructured line, with evidences of some vanadium existing as a ferri-/ferromagnetic surface phase in the catalyst particles, likely formed by induced oxygen vacancies during reaction (reducing atmosphere) and quite resistant to the regeneration step.