Since technology development in high throughput experimentation for heterogeneous catalysis discovery ramped-up in the 1990's, most of the reactor development has been in primary screening (100-300 catalysts in parallel for qualitative analysis) and secondary screening (8-64 catalysts in parallel for quantitative analysis). In addition to reactor technology at these throughput levels, efforts were made to develop corresponding synthesis and analytical tools to match the throughput of the reactors such that no additional bottleneck formed in the overall workflow. These primary and secondary screening workflows have matured in technology over the years for heterogeneous catalysis applications, and several companies, such as Symyx, now even offer these moderate throughput capabilities as products for-sale.

However, the rate of commercialization of discovered catalysts from high-throughput workflows has not increased at a rate comparable to the rate of discoveries resulting from secondary screening. This has continually been due to the bottleneck that forms at the point of pilot plant trials, in which the catalyst is formulated and analyzed on commercially-sized supports for the first time (secondary screening may be on commercial supports, but is typically screened as crushed and sized particles). Due to typically low availability of pilot plant equipment, and the expense and time associated with running a single catalyst in a pilot run, only several attempts may be made at the pilot scale before stopping commercialization efforts, even if secondary screening resulted in commercially-viable leads.

In this presentation, a novel reactor to screen heterogeneous catalysts in their final commercial form (i.e. beads, rings, cylinders, extrudates, etc.) on a benchtop in a rapid, high-throughput mode will be described. Efforts to design the benchtop reactor to match hydrodynamic and heat transfer characteristics of an industrial fixed-bed reactor will be discussed. As a case study, results for several different catalysts in a highly exothermic partial oxidation application will be shown, in which each catalyst could be fully characterized within 2 days at lab-scale conditions. This reactor, although not intended to replace a successful pilot plant campaign prior to commercialization, is a powerful tool to increase the likelihood of a successful pilot run on the first attempt. In addition, it can prove powerful for QC of catalyst batches from vendors or for process optimization studies.