MechChem Africa February 2019

Innovation award for Sasol R&T team

SAIChE’s 2018 Innovation Award was presented to Sasol Group Technology’s Research and Technology team, consisting of Enrico Caricato, Herman Hoffeldt, Ricky Kotze, Jared Lloyd, Nico Prinsloo and Carel Swanepoel for its work on the development of an automated bench-scale control system for evaluating reforming catalysts. Nico Prinsloo helps MechChem Africa to summarise the innovation.

T he SAIChE 2018 Innovation Award was celebrated with a luncheon at the Wanderers Club in Johannes- burg and alcohol free champagne, in keeping with Sasol’s strict safety protocol. The winning team from Sasol’s Research and Technology division won the award for an automated control systemthey developed for the bench-scale evaluation of new naph- tha reforming catalysts for their continuous catalytic regeneration (CCR) plants. “We at Sasol have an ongoing need to model the performance of commercial catalyst’s on a bench scale, to allow us to continuously improve the performance of our Fischer-Tropsch (FT) syngas-to-liquid process,” Prinsloo says. “Specifically, we need to evaluate new commercial catalysts at a constant research octane number (iso-RON) – and this needs to happen on the benches of our laboratories,” he explains, adding that this is has long been a significant challengebecause theparameter changes that occur while reforming a bench- scale raw naphtha sample happen too fast

for manual control, especially when dealing with naphtha’s derived fromSasol’s FT-based coal-to-liquids (CTL) process. “Sowe needed to automate themanipula- tion of process conditions and this is what we have managed to achieved in this work,” he says. Catalytic naphtha reforming is used at all refineries to convert naphthas – the low-oc- tane raw liquidhydrocarbons usually distilled from crude oil – into high-octane liquid prod- ucts called reformates. “These reformates are then used to blend the high-octane fuels we use in our motor vehicles,” he continues. “The process is a true industry workhorse and almost every refinery in the world has such a processing unit to produce blend products with the octane numbers required,” Prinsloo informs MechChem Africa . Naphtha reforming at Sasol In essence the naphtha reforming process used at Sasol’s coal to liquids (CTL) complex, involves the isomerisation and aromatisation of feeds containing paraffins such as heptane,

Professor Lizelle Van Dyk, associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, presents SAIChE’s Innovation Award for 2018 to Nicolaas Prinsloo, representing Sasol Group Technology’s Research and Technology team. and Vimal Bhimsan, vice president of Process Development at Sasol. Photo: Cara Prinsloo octane and nonane into highly branched and aromatic liquid hydrocarbons. “We typically look for molecules with six or more carbon atoms, which we refer to as C5+ naphthas.

Sasol’s award winning Research and Technology team with SAIChE board members, from left: Enrico Caricato; Lizelle Van Dyk (SAIChE); Carel Swanepoel; Nico Prinsloo; Craig Sheridan (SAIChE); Vimal Bhimsan; Herman Hoffeldt; Ricky Kotze; Jared Lloyd; and Gerhard Marais. Photo: Cara Prinsloo

6 ¦ MechChem Africa • February 2019