CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Hydroprocessing of fuels can help meeting the demands of the market in terms of refining heavier (more refractory) feeds while manufacturing products with enhanced quality [1]; higher H:C ratio, lower molecular weight and less aromatic-heteroatom molecules. For severe hydroprocessing (hydrocracking), a bifunctional catalyst is used [2] in order to yield products of hydrogenation-hydrogolysis (on the metallic sites) and cracking (on the acidic sites). Although the mechanisms of reaction hydrocarbon- hydrogen on the metallic sites have been extensible studied [3-5], the analogous ones on the acidic sites (with hydrogen) remains less well understood. In this work we have studied the hydroconversion of a cycloalkane (methylcycloalkane) on a zeolite HZSM-5 in hydrocracking conditions as a model reaction. Tracing reaction products and their ratios enable us to state the condition at which certain mechanisms dominate so that enhanced product distributions can be obtained.