Zirconium modified TUD-1 mesoporous catalysts for the hydrodesulfurization of FCC diesel

In this paper, a highly active three-dimensional Zr modified TUD-1 mesoporous material was successfully synthesized by using TEA as a template and TEAOH as an auxiliary template via sal-gel method. The synthesized materials were characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, BET and UV-vis DRS. The characterization results indicated that zirconium was incorporated into the framework of TUD-1. TEM images of ZrT-100 showed a clearly worm-like structure, indicating that the TUD-1 silica framework or mesoporous conformation was still kept even after the incorporation of Zr. Additionally, the as-synthesized material had large pore size, high surface area and high pore volume. The hydrodesulfurization(HDS) performances of the supported catalysts were evaluated in a high pressure micro-reactor using FCC diesel from PetroChina Hohhot petrochemical company as feedstock, furthermore, it was found that NiMo/Al2O3-ZrT-100 with a relatively high Si/Zr ratio among the series catalysts of NiMo/Al2O3-ZrT-m showed the highest HDS efficiency, which was as high as 99.3%. Moreover, the best operating conditions of NiMo/Al2O3-ZrT-100 catalyst were achieved, which are the temperature of 350-360 C, the pressure of 6 MPa, the WHSV of 1.0-1.2 h(-1), and the H-2 to oil ratio of 600 ml ml(-1). (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.