Nickel Based Catalyst for Hydrocracking of Light Aromatics and Middle Distillates to Light Paraffins

The content of aromatics in the gasoline must be reduced due to environmental regulations; which means that there will be a surplus of these compounds in the refineries. A solution to this surplus is to convert them into light paraffins used as feedstock for the petrochemical industry.;In this study, three novel bifunctional catalysts consisting of nickel supported on a ZSM-5 zeolite where tested and compared using toluene as a model molecule. Based on their products yield one catalyst was selected to be tested with hydrotreated light cycle oil.;This work includes all the details concerning catalyst testing, feedstock analyses and a kinetic study for Ni-ZSM-5 catalysts prepared by different methods. As a whole this thesis shows the feasibility of replacing the Pd-ZSM-5 with the Ni-ZSM-5 for aromatics ring opening. A particular route of interest was the incorporation of Ni during the preparation at the early step of zeolite synthesis.