Enhanced catalyst performance using integrated structured functionalities

The multifunctional reactor is a well-known concept of expediently manipulating concentration and temperature profiles along the reactor. The integration of additional functionalities with heterogeneous catalytic activity results in an enhancement of overall process performance, but its potential is often limited by mass transfer resistances. One way of overcoming these limitations is to couple the functionalities more intimately at the particle scale. Mass transport by diffusion thus only needs to take place over smaller distances and extra degrees of freedom for the design of the whole process become available. The enhancement in performance for multifunctional catalysts was evaluated for two types of reaction systems: the integration of adsorption with reaction and the coupling of two catalytic active sites. The results obtained indicate unambiguously that microstructuring of multifunctional catalysts is a powerful tool for enhancing catalyst performance and offers new degrees of freedom for both catalyst and reactor design. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.