Kinetics of ethylene oligomerization over Ni-H-Beta catalysts

Abstract We report the kinetics of ethylene oligomerization over the Ni-H-Beta for temperatures ranging between 50 and 100 °C and pressures ranging between 5 and 28 atm. According to our results, the apparent activation energies involved in the formation of butene, hexene, and octene are 44, 78, and 60 kJ.mol−1, respectively. The measured lower apparent activation energy for butene formation relative to hexene and octene is a likely result of the fact that the measured butene formation is not the true (forward) rate of formation of butene but it the net rate because of the consumption of butene in secondary reactions. Analysis of the reaction order indicates that participation of butene in chain-growth reactions takes place via desorption followed by re-adsorption of butene on the catalyst. The results also indicate that hexene undergoes a similar process. In the present paper, we refer to the pathway involving co-oligomerization of butene and hexene as “cascade co-oligomerization”. Based on these findings, we proposed a reaction network and modeled reaction rate expressions for ethylene consumption and butene, hexene, and octene formation based on the construction of a micro-kinetic model. We calculated the kinetic parameters involved in the reaction network proposed and found evidence that the formation of octene proceeds mainly via the “cascade co-oligomerization” of re-adsorbed butene with ethylene.