Sharif Digital Repository

During oil refinement, solid catalysts which contain metals such as aluminum, tungstan, molybdenum and nickel are highly used. Following several times reductions and re-applications, their activity potentiality is decreased in a such a way that they can not be re-used., as a result of which they are treated as solid waste. Based on natural potentiality, microorganisms are defined as convertibles of solid compounds to extractive forms and soluble materials. This project aims at finding other factors that have more impact on biological extraction and determining optimal conditions for biological extraction in order to reach maximum extraction efficiency within discontinuous conditions. The... 

Recovery of heavy metals from Hydrocracking spent catalyst was studied in a bioreactor by Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans. At first adaptation of microorganisms was done with spent catalyst in shaker flask. Using central composite design (CCD) the experiments were conducted in order to find optimized condition. Three factors such as particle size, pulp density and aeration rate were examined. Reduced cubic models were established to identify the relationship between the recovery percent of the metals and the variables. The results showed the maximum extraction of 87% Mo, 37% Ni and 15% Al were achieved after 7 days of batch process in bioreactor. The optimal values of variables were pulp... 

Every year, an enormous amount of catalysts are consumed in oil refineries during refining processes. After some regeneration cycles in order to recover their activity, they are not anymore effective and must be disposed. These spent catalysts are regarded as dangerous solid wastes as they significantly include some contaminations like vanadium, nickel, arsenic, sodium. From another point of view, the metals present in spent catalysts are highly valuable and are used extensively in steel industry and manufacture of special alloys. So, it sounds profitable to extract and recover these metals from such a cheap source instead of minerals and ores. Basically, there are two main processes, hydro-... 

The petroleum industry is one of the technological applications which more platinum-group metals (PGM) employs. Therefore, the recovery of the PGMs from the waste catalysts of petroleum industry could be an important source to obtain these precious metals, with economic and environmental consequences.
In this work, the recovery of platinum and palladium from petroleum catalysts has been studied using waste RG-582 and LD-265 catalysts. Both catalyst were characterized through XRF, XRD and AAS. Aqua regia used as a leaching agent and The effect of dissolution temperature and time, liquid/ solid ratio (L/S), size of particles and elimination of coke was investigated. Under optimized... 

Platinum is one of the most used catalysts in refining and petrochemical industries. Also, Platinum uses in other industries like automobile catalytic convertor. As respect to importance of Platinum in these industries, growth of its consumption in recent decades and its very high price, recovery of Platinum is essential. Hence, many of various methods including hydro-metallurgy are applied. In despite of these wide spreading experimental investigations, due to low information about the reactions and the nature of reaction products, a few investigations were done on kinetics of Platinum recovery. A new method that used iodine solution to extract Platinum from spent reforming catalysts was... 

In this study, at first the V2O5 spent catalysts were characterized. The aim was to identifying whether these catalyst may be regenerated. Then, for feasibility study of them, three methods were applied: washing, diffusion and milling the spent catalysts for their subsequent reproduction. A variety of techniques such as XRD, XRF, AAS, TPR and TPO were applied in order to identify factors contributing in vanadium pentoxide catalysts deactivation. The results showed that approximately all of pollutants caused their performance deterioration, while they still have some active phases. Then, the polluted catalysts were washed (their yield increased from 43% to 72.2%). In the underside of the... 

High demand and price and restricted availability of Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) have made platinum recovery a major field of study for researchers and industries. Various methods have been introduced for this purpose. Ion exchange, leaching and liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) are just a few examples. Nowadays Solvent Extraction (SX) is one of the most challenging areas of study for platinum recovery from spent catalysts due to its simplicity and optimum cost. In this study, the commercial spent catalyst’s platinum was dissolved in aqua-regia after XRF analysis. Then it was extracted by the organic material Trioctylphosphineoxide diluted in toluene in the presence of Alkaline metal salts.... 

In this project, bioleaching has been investigated as a solution for detoxification and metal recovery of spent hydrocracking catalysts of Tehran petroleum refinery which is listed as a hazardous waste. In this project four stages has been accomplished as follows: 1- Adaptation of Penicillium simplicissimum and Aspergillus niger with different heavy metals present in a spent hydrocracking catalyst, individually and with mixture of metals as well as adaptation by spent catalyst which the cumulative action of multi-metals enhanced the toxic effect; 2- The one-step, two-step, and spent medium bioleaching of the spent catalyst by the adapted fungi in batch cultures were investigated and... 

Bubble column reactors owe their wide application area to a number of advantages they provide both in design and operation as compared to other reactors. This type of reactors can be used as bio reactors in which microorganisms are applied to perform a special process such as bioleaching. In this study, a laboratory scale bubble column reactor for bio recovery of metals in Tehran refinery used catalysts has been simulated via computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The results are presented in two parts; in first, hydrodynamic characteristics of multiphase flows in reactor are presented. Gas hold up, liquid phase velocity distribution and shear stress in bubble column for different aeration...