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Sharing Session

Dr. Oki Muraza, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Saudi Arabia

Date : 15 August 2016 (Monday)
Time : 2.30 pm – 4.30 pm
Venue : Meeting Room, N31, Centre for Sustainable Nanomaterials (CSNano), Ibnu Sina Institute for Scientific and Industrial Research, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor Bahru 
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Dr. Oki Murazza

Dr. Oki Muraza is an Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering at KFUPM. In the past six years, as a principal investigator, he secured about 18 million SR (~$ 4.8 million) research grants from companies and national funding agency (KACST). He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU Eindhoven) on Catalytic Microreactors with Prof. Jaap Schouten. He obtained his MSc in Chemical Engineering from Technische Universiteit Delft (TU Delft) with MSc research on Zeolite Membranes under supervision Prof. Em. Koos Jansen. His current activities are mainly in catalysts for selective production of propylene, heavy oil production and upgrading and methanol-to-propylene. Prior to joining KFUPM as a Faculty, he worked as a Research Associate at The Petroleum Institute AD in a research collaboration with University of Minnesota (Prof. Michael Tsapatsis) on zeolite based catalysts/adsorbents for hydrocarbon processing. He was a JPI Research Fellow Hokkaido University (with Prof. Takao Masuda) in 2011-2012 and a visiting researcher at Åbo Akademi Finland in 2007. He was working in offshore oil and gas operation with Repsol YPF-SES as Chemical Supervisor and Production Supervisor From 2001 until 2002. He received JPI Research Exchange Fellowship in 2011-2012, NIOK (Dutch Institute for Catalyst Research) Award as one of the highest scores in a NIOK examination in December 2004 over about 50 PhD students in catalysis fields in the Netherlands. He was awarded with Huygens Scholarship (2003-2004), The Netherlands, UNESCO SFP, TU Delft Scholarship (2002-2004) and The Dow Chemical Company Scholarship (1997-2000).

Nanosized zeolites in commercially important hydrocarbon process
The oversupply of crude oil and natural gas due to successful production of shale gas in the North America has stimulated many countries to revisit technologies to convert crude oil and natural gas to valuable chemicals. In this presentation, at least two main applications of nanozeolites in commercially important processes such as on-purpose production of propylene and methanol conversion to olefins will be highlighted. Due to large production volume of methanol in the world in the coming years, conversion of methanol to olefins is an interesting process. Methanol as an important derivative of natural gas (methane) can be converted to fuels (such as gasoline and diesel) or chemicals (propylene and ethylene) over solid acid catalysts. Methanol to gasoline is a promising route, mostly using three-dimensional zeolites such as ZSM-5. Methanol can also be converted to diesel first to olefins using ZSM-22 (TON) and later the olefins can be transformed into diesel using oligomerization process over hierarchical one-dimensional pore zeolites. This work presentation will highlight some of remarkable heterogeneous catalysts applied in methanol-to-propylene as an important edge of methanol-to-olefin technologies. The transformation from methanol to dimethyl ether (DME), DME to olefins and methanol to propylene were investigated using different series of solid acid catalysts, especially zeolites [4-6]. The catalyst effectiveness factor of zeolite-based catalysts has been significantly improved by using three different approaches: (i) fabrication of nanocrystals of ZSM-22 (TON) which were applied in methanol-to-propylene, (ii) the fabrication of hierarchical EU-1 (EUO) by alkaline and acid post-treatments [5-6] and (iii) the fabrication of SAPO-34 (CHA) coated on SiC foams. Nanocrystals of ZSM-22 (TON) and hierarchical EU-1 (EUO) zeolites were applied in the transformation of the methanol to olefins. The keys of finding better catalysts were the fabrication of nanosized zeolite crystals, the adapted methods to synthesize hierarchical zeolites. We developed different catalysts mostly derived from one dimensional pore zeolites such as (i) nanosized ZSM-22 (TON framework) and (ii) hierarchical EU-1 (EUO framework). Pure nanosized ZSM-22 crystals (100 nm) were synthesized with low aspect ratio by using a hydrothermal autoclave with horizontal rotation, while the submicrometer ZSM-22 crystals (∼300 nm) were achieved by using 5 wt.% ethylene glycol as a crystal growth modifier. The textural properties were almost similar for both samples with different crystal sizes, except the smaller crystals had larger external surface area. Production of light olefins from methanol conversion was examined over ZSM-22 (TON) zeolites with different crystal lengths (100 and 300 nm). High selectivity to light olefins (>86%) combined with low selectivity toward the undesired over C5 hydrocarbons (10%) and paraffins (4%) was observed initially over all ZSM-22 zeolite samples. As compared with the submicrometer crystals (300 nm), the 100 nm crystals showed better catalytic activity. The higher catalytic activity of TON nanocrystals can be attributed to the higher external surface area. Therefore, the diffusion problem caused by pore blocking was noticeably reduced. Apart from nanosized TON, our hierarchical EUO is also promising catalysts for methanol to olefins and dimethylether (DME) to olefins.

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