Acetylene Hydrogenation Catalyst – SARV510

SARV-510 is a spherical shaped silver promoted palladium-based catalyst supported on alumina developed for selective hydrogenation of acetylene to ethylene in tail-end process configurations. Thanks to their outstanding performance, excellent stability and long operating cycles, the catalysts help producers increase ethylene yield and total profitability while reducing operating costs. The selectivity and consequent stability of SARV-510 ensures reliable, on-specification performance over an unprecedentedly wide operating range.

Process:
In catalytic hydrocarbon cracking processes, there is always the presence of acetylene that needs to be removed for technological and economic considerations. The effective way of separating acetylene is to selectively hydrogenate it to ethylene. The concentration of acetylene needs to be reduced to less than 1 ppm v before polymerization of ethylene.
Tail-End clean-up is the purification procedure where the acetylene is selectively hydrogenated in the concentrated mono-olefin streams after the major fractionation steps have been completed and just prior to the final separation into the product olefin.
The concentrated ethylene streams (de-ethanizer overhead) will usually contain 0.5–2.5 mol% acetylene, which have to be removed to less than 1 ppm v.
Two factors are the keys to the assessment of this process. One is the ethylene selectivity, i.e., the fraction of ethylene produced by acetylene conversion, and the other is the catalyst lifetime which is limited by green oil deposition during the reaction.