Specialists from NUST MISIS, in collaboration with colleagues from Belarus and Sweden, have developed a new catalyst to accelerate the processing of heavy oil fractions and reduce energy consumption. This was reported by the press service of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.
The new catalyst is based on molybdenum carbide nanopowder. This approach avoids the use of expensive precious metals traditionally used in such technologies.
The resulting catalyst reduces the activation energy of thermal decomposition by 25% and is effective in various chemical reactions.
Processing complex petroleum products requires a fairly high temperature and a large amount of energy. Catalysts are designed to accelerate chemical reactions by breaking strong bonds between carbon and hydrogen atoms.
The new development demonstrates better accessibility than analogues.
The molybdenum carbide powder obtained using our technology is capable of increasing the efficiency of thermal decomposition of used aviation oils by several times, which will greatly facilitate and reduce the cost of their processing.
Dmitry Moskovskikh also emphasized that the new powder increases the rate of destruction of complex components by 145 - 639% depending on the temperature.
Earlier www1.ru reported that a catalyst for simplifying the extraction of high-viscosity oil was developed in Russia.