Oligomerization of ethylene is an important industrial reaction for the synthesis of select C2n oligomers utilized as or to manufacture commodity chemicals. In this work, ethylene oligomerization reaction was performed on a nickel containing microporous titanosilicate zeolite, Ni-ETS-10 (Si/Ti=5), which can be synthesized using a template-free procedure and provides very high loading of isolated Ni2+ cationic sites (Ni/Ti=1) for oligomerization reaction. The reaction was performed in an isothermal plug flow packed bed reaction unit at 180oC, 5 atm ethylene absolute pressure and at WHSV=90 gethylene /(gcatalyst h). C4 (selectivity&gt;88%) and C6 (selectivity&gt;10%) oligomers were the main reaction products with no observed cracking by-products and the maximum observed activity for Ni-ETS-10 was 6.45 goligomers / (gcatalyst h). Brønsted acid (H+) sites were also introduced along with Ni2+ in ETS-10 by selectively replacing the tetrahedral framework Si with trivalent elements (Al, Ga and B) in order to fine tune product selectivity (e.g. to obtain liquid fuels or longer oligomers like C8). Other conventional nickel containing silicates, Ni-H-ZSM-5 and Ni-MCM-41 were also tested for comparison purposes. We further plan to increase accessibility of active sites (Ni2+ and H+) and reduce deactivation by introducing mesoporosity and by synthesizing two-dimensional ETS-10 nano-crystals.

Oligomerization of ethylene to select oligomers on Ni2+-containing ETS-10

255th National Meeting (2018)

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