Zeolite-based process could aid petrol-to-diesel conversion

Researchers at Stockholm University and the Polytechnic University of Valencia have demonstrated the conversion in the lab and are now looking for an industrial partner to scale up the conversion.

The Valencia team, headed by Prof Avelino Corma, first succeeded in synthesising a novel aluminosilicate — named ITQ-39 — which belongs to the zeolite class of a porous crystals.

However, ITQ-39 turned out to be one of the most complex zeolites ever encountered, with very small crystals, arranged not in a uniform fashion, but rather chaotically.

‘Whenever Prof Corma’s team has some challenging and difficult structure they cannot solve, they send them to us,’ Prof Xiaodong Zou of Stockholm University told The Engineer.

‘With many compounds, you can get really nice crystals and solve them by X-ray diffraction, even when the crystals are small. But when it’s nano-sized with chaotic defects [as with ITQ-39], it’s just not possible.’

Its solution was to use electron microscopy, combined with computer modelling — not a well-established approach for this type of crystal analysis, and for which the Stockholm team is pioneering.