Crude oil is a natural mineral oil mainly composed of hydrocarbons as well as other elements such as Sulfur, Nitrogen and some metals. These elements, mainly metals, nitrogen and sulfur are responsible of catalyst poisoning, environmental pollution and corrosion in process lines and should be treated during the refining of the final product (gasoil, kerosene, diesel, …). For this purpose, different processes are used within refineries mainly based on interaction of the oil with hydrogen and catalyst. Hydrodesulphurization (HDS) aims to reduce the sulfur amount and hydrodemetallation (HDM) is focused on the treatment of nickel (Ni) and vanadium (V) present in the original oil.<br/><br/>The catalysts used within these processes are also slowly deactivated by the deposition of poisons and coke. The recycling of these catalysts is based on regeneration, consisting in a controlled oxidation which eliminates coke and converts sulfides back to oxides. Regenerated catalysts can recover activities rather similar to fresh ones but the presence of some poisons still present after regeneration may decrease the activity and limit their reuses. The actual procedure is based on batch analysis by X Rays Fluorescence that is giving a global concentration of the poisons present in the batch. In this context, LIBS might be able to provide on-line concentration of metals and sulfur in liquid sample and give individual information on each grain of the catalyst. For this conference, we propose three examples of LIBS application on both, liquid petroleum and catalyst samples. The first case is to illustrate the possible monitoring of these processes by on line analysis based on LIBS in order to follow Ni, V and sulphur concentrations in petroleum products. The second case proposed in this conference is to illustrate the study performed in order to test the feasibility of ultra rapid analysis of each grain of catalyst in order to sort them according to their composition.<br/>The final part will exemplify the use of the rapidity and sensibility of the LIBS to monitor mapping of the cross section of a catalyst in order to detect and quantify element that are not clearly evidenced using conventional techniques.

How far can we go with LIBS for the fuel industry?

255th National Meeting (2018)

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