| Abstract
| - Atmospheric residue desulfurization (ARDS) is one of the major processes installed in refineries worldwidefor upgrading petroleum residues to more-valuable clean products. Because of the importance of the process,research and development related to the process and its associated catalysts has gained increasing attentioninternationally. Hence, it is necessary to develop a reliable testing methodology for evaluating ARDS catalystsin a relatively short time. From our experience, it has been determined that, within 2−3 months, an ARDScatalyst system consisting of 3−5 catalysts can be evaluated and their performance in an industrial unit canbe predicted. This requires generating quality data related to the initial activities, kinetic parameters of individualcatalysts, the deactivation behavior, and maximum metal capacity in the catalyst system. Using the proposedcatalyst evaluation methodology, values of the apparent reaction kinetics and catalyst life can be determined.These data are fed into an in-house developed mathematical model, which enables the prediction of theperformance of the same catalyst system in an industrial scale. Very satisfactory results, from both pilot-plant test and commercial plant prediction, are realized from the developed methodology. When conductinglong-life tests using the same feedstock and catalyst system, but under different operation modes, such as theconstant-sulfur mode or the constant-temperature mode, the catalyst deactivation behaviors between the twolife tests are significantly different, However, their respective values of the maximum metal-on-catalyst(MMOC) of the total catalyst system are very similar.
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