Microwave catalytic pyrolysis of heavy oil: a lump kinetic study approach

Managing heavy oil (HO) has become a vital issue in terms of environmental considerations. Microwave pyrolysis of HO is one of the efficient methods of upgrading and recycling this complex material. In this work, microwave catalytic pyrolysis (MCP) of HO was explored by investigating the effect of heating time (2-10minutes) and temperature (460-730ºC) on the product yield and quality. The most critical point of this study was utilizing a unique design of SiC foam@HZSM-5 as a microwave absorber and catalyst simultaneously. This special design could eliminate the main problem of previous studies: the unwanted temperature gradient inside the reactor, which was misleading the prediction of kinetic parameters by recording the wrong temperature. The yield of each product’s category from the MCP process was reconstructed through a biharmonic spline interpolation (BSI) algorithm to visualize the simultaneous effect of the heating time and temperature on the yield. The optimum temperature for the MCP process was about 600ºC and a heating time of 6minutes, which yielded the most valuable hydrocarbons in liquid and gas products. The produced liquid oil and non-condensable gases were analyzed through GC-MS and the collected results were categorized based on the properties of the detected compounds. An eight-lump kinetic model was then proposed based on that categorization. The calculated pre-exponential factors (k0) were higher than the expected values, while the apparent activation energies (Ea) were considerably lower than the reported data in the literature, which was due to the non-thermal and thermal effects of microwave irradiation on the reaction mechanism. The validation of the proposed model indicated the capability of these model to predict reliable data under these conditions.