Seeking New Process Technology to Manufacture Heterogeneous Catalysts
A catalyst's performance is typically strongly interlinked with its manufacturing method, determining properties such as crystal size, porosity, mechanical stability of formed shapes, homogeneity, morphology, crystallinity, etc. Thus, different properties to the formally identical, established products are expected. The technology seeker is keen to jointly explore if and how catalyst performance would be changed - for better or worse. They are open to explore technologies that can improve the production process and the resulting catalyst over the existing state-of-the art, for instance increased yield, increased quality, tuning relevant material properties, reduced cost, or reduced CO2 footprint and increased sustainibility of production.
Typical materials which the company manufactures are zeolites, (mixed) metal oxides, and supported (precious) metals and metal oxides (supports typically are based on alumina, steatite, cordierite or calcium aluminate). Specific exemplary materials would be Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 (used for methanol synthesis), FeOx (used as catalyst precursor for ammonia synthesis) or Pd or Ni on alumina carriers (used e.g. for hydrogenation or dehydrogenation).
The resulting catalysts are currently used for applications around synthesis gas (e.g. methanol production, steam reforming, ammonia production, water gas shift), petrochemicals (e.g. olefin production, aromatics, styrene, ethylene oxide), and specialties (e.g. emission control, off-gas treatment, gas purification, selective oxidation, hydrogenation, fuel upgrading).
New methods that are relevant along the production of inorganic solids are of interest, for instance for precipitation, mixing, synthesis, aging, filtration, impregnation, coating, drying, calcining and heat treatment, as well as shaping and forming (i.e. tableting, extrusion and pelletizing).