CARLO GIORGIO VISCONTI
Politecnico di Milano

INTENSIFICATION OF THE FISCHER-TROPSCH SYNTHESIS THROUGH A NOVEL STRUCTURED PACKED-BED REACTOR

The development of compact GTL or BTL processes asks for an intensified low-temperature Fischer-Tropsch (FT) technology, where highly active catalysts are exploited in small-size reactors granting high heat and mass-transfer rates and low pressure drops. A few years ago, the adoption of multitubular reactors loaded with structured catalysts having highly conductive honeycomb supports has been proposed by Politecnico di Milano and Eni as an alternative to conventional FT packed-bed reactors, which were shown to be inappropriate to manage the high exothermicity of the FT process on a small-scale.
The new technology has been designed as a result of the joint efforts of many people, both from Academia and from Industry, expert of both chemical engineering and catalysis. In my talk, starting from the criticisms of conventional FT reactor technologies, I will go through the main R&D activities carried out in Milano to develop and demonstrate the novel Fischer-Tropsch reactor configuration.
By illustrating both the experimental and the modeling parts of the research, and by discussing aspects from the nano-scale (catalyst design) to the macro-scale (reactor and process design), I will try show how demanding, extensive and exciting may be the R&D process from the lab to the pilot-scale.

CARLO GIORGIO VISCONTI is an assistant professor of Chemical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and chair of the “Fundamentals of process industry” course for MSc students.
He received a M.S. degree summa cum laude from Politecnico di Milano in 2005 and a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in 2008. During his Ph.D., he spent 1 year abroad working in the Iglesia group at the University of California Berkeley.
Dr. Visconti is member of the editorial advisory boards of “Frontiers in Chemistry - Chemical Engineering” and “Transactions of the Indian Ceramic Society”.
On the occasion of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry, Dr. Visconti received the “Young Researcher in Chemistry Award” for achievement in catalysis, and two years later he was awarded with the “Leonardo-UGIS Award” for his qualities as young researcher/communicator. A few months ago, Dr. Visconti received the 2014 “Canada-Italy Innovation Award” from the Embassy of Canada to Italy for a joint research project with prof. Ya-Huei Chin on the CO2 conversion to fuel and chemicals.
Dr. Visconti has co-authored more than 30 publications and is a co-inventor in 3 Italian and 2 international patents. His research group addresses the design, synthesis, and structural and mechanistic characterization of inorganic solids useful as catalysts for chemical reactions important in energy use, as well as kinetics, reactor modeling and intensification of industrial catalytic processes.

For more info: www.chem-eng.utoronto.ca/news.htm

Websites of Interest

• University of Toronto
• Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
• Department of Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry