Multi-technical study of diffusion phenomena in vacuum gas oil hydrotreatment ; Approche multitechnique des phénomènes de diffusion en hydrotraitement de distillats

The catalytic cracking has an important role in fuels production from heavy oil cuts like vacuum gas oil (VGO). To optimize these processes, a pre-hydrotreatment is required. The amount of work dealt by the research community in the last years has highly contributed to the enhancement of the catalyst’s activity. Therefore, the internal mass transfer can become the limiting step and it must be quantified.A methodology based on inverse liquid chromatography has been developed to characterize the mass transfer within alumina catalyst supports. The experimental setup was also used to study the influence of several parameters into mass transfer properties such as, adsorption, temperature, and active phase precursors. In mesoporous aluminas, the diffusion regime undertaken by saturated compounds, going from gasoline to VGO is the molecular regime. For different alumina supports, tortuosity values were estimated and correlated to the textural properties (porosity, specific surface area and pore size distribution). These results showed that the aluminas can not be considered as homogeneous supports given the estimated mass transfer properties. Thus, we assume that a hierarchical porous structure might be in cause. A catalytic test promoted in a stirred reactor was also developed to study the mass transfer properties under reactive conditions. The impact of the particle grains size into the hydrodesulphurization of a synthetized molecule was characterized and modeled. A good agreement was found between the data obtained using the inverse chromatography experiments and the catalytic tests ; Dans l'industrie du raffinage, les procédés de craquage catalytique permettent la production de carburants à partir de coupes pétrolières lourdes, telles que les distillats sous vides (DSV). Pour optimiser ces procédés, un hydrotraitement préalable est nécessaire. Ces dernières années, les travaux conséquents de R&D ont considérablement amélioré l'activité des catalyseurs d'hydrotraitement. Par conséquent, le transfert de matière ...