Synthesis and Development of Activated Carbon Supported Iron (Fe) Catalyst for Fischer Tropsch Synthesis /

Abstract

Energy consumption is increasing day by day placing a lot of load on fossil fuels which in turns cause various threats to environment. Among other forms of energy, liquid fuels are most commonly and intensively used in daily life. To match the demand of liquid fuels scientists are working to find new sources to generate relatively clean liquid fuels that poses minimum environmental threat. Fischer Tropsch Synthesis is one of such efforts that generate synthetic hydrocarbons from various sources like coal, biomass, natural gas and environmental carbon dioxide. The Fischer Tropsch Synthesis uses syngas (mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen) to generate liquid hydrocarbons at high temperatures of 200 to 350 oC in the presence of a catalyst at high pressures (up to 20 bars). This study focuses on developing a carbon based iron catalyst for Fischer Tropsch Synthesis (FTS) process and to check the effect of promoters on the activity of the prepared catalyst. Potassium promoter is used in this study. Carbon supported iron catalyst is prepared by co-precipitation method and the promoter is added by wetness impregnation method. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of all the prepared samples are done using various characterization techniques. XRD and SEM were performed to gather information about the structure and morphology of the catalyst. EDS was used for elemental analysis of the samples. BET and TGA are two techniques that give information about the properties of catalyst like surface area and thermal stability. The samples were tested for FTS process in a micro reactor especially to check the C5+ selectivity. The product obtained from FTS reactor was analyzed by using GC-MS. The results showed very high C5+ selectivity for promoted catalyst as compared to unprompted catalyst.