Relative reactivities of alkanes in multi-component catalytic cracking reactions

Abstract

An experimental technique is discussed for measuring relative reactivities of alkanes in the catalytic cracking of multi-component hydrocarbon mixtures over a heterogeneous, Y-zeolitebased catalyst at 250–350 °C. With the technique, ca. 0.1 μl of an alkane mixture is evaporated and contacted with a catalyst, after which the mixture of reaction products and the unreacted feed enters the chromatographic column and is immediately analyzed. The technique is used to measure relative reactivities of 21 alkanes in a single experiment. The principal results of these experiments are similar to the results of single-component cracking: alkane reactivity rapidly increases with the increase of the carbon number, and methyl-branched alkanes are more reactive than linear alkanes. However, the variations in alkane reactivities as a function of their molecular weight and skeleton structure differ very significantly between single- and multicomponent experiments.