Effect of Active Component Contents to Catalytic Performance on Fe-Cu-K/ZSM5 Fischer-Tropsch Catalyst Joo-Young Cheon • Suk-Hwan Kang • Jong Wook Bae • Seon-Ju Park • Ki-Won Jun • G. Murali Dhar • Kwan-Young Lee Received: 7 October 2009 / Accepted: 29 November 2009 / Published online: 16 December 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 Abstract Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis (FTS) on Fe-Cu-K/ ZSM5 catalysts prepared by varying the amount of active components for a given amount of ZSM5 has been inves- tigated to elucidate the effects of iron concentration. The catalysts were prepared by conventional wet impregnation method using ZSM5 and subsequently calcined at 500 °C for 5 h. The different catalytic performance is verified by the variation of microporosity such as surface area and pore size distribution of Fe-Cu-K/ZSM5, acidity, reducibility of active phases and the presence of various crystalline phases like a-Fe 2 O 3 , metallic iron and iron carbide. The charac- terization results are analyzed along with catalytic perfor- mance to arrive at optimum amount of active components and to obtain maximum selectivity of FTS products with high conversion of CO during FTS reaction. Keywords Fischer-Tropsch synthesis  Iron concentration  ZSM5  Copper  Potassium 1 Introduction Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) is a well established commercial process for converting natural gas, coal or biomass to premium fuels and useful chemicals. FTS is generally operating at two different temperature ranges depending on the targeted carbon number range such as premium diesel, naphtha, wax or light olefins. It is denoted as high temperature Fischer-Tropsch (HTFT) reaction operating around 280–350 °C and low temperature Fischer-Tropsch (HTFT) reaction around 200–250 °C[1]. Iron-based catalyst is generally used for HTFT and LTFT reaction together in a fixed-bed or fluidized-bed reactors, however, cobalt-based catalyst is just applied for LTFT reaction in a slurry bubble column or fixed-bed reactor due to its high formation rate of byproducts, mainly CH 4 , at high temperature. Cobalt-based catalyst is preferred for LTFT reaction starting from natural gas feed stock and iron-based catalyst is preferred for the feed stock with low H 2 /CO molar ratio obtained from the gasification of coal and biomass. For iron-based FTS catalysts, various pro- moters are used to enhance the reducibility of iron species, to increase chain growth probability and/or to increase the active phase like iron carbide and catalytic stability during FTS reaction [2, 3]. Copper, manganese or potassium are one of the representative promoters on iron-based FTS catalysts, and structural promoters such as Al 2 O 3 or SiO 2 are additionally included with an appropriate quantity to impart structural stability as well as to improve mechanical properties [4, 5]. In addition, an acidic site and/or shape selective functionality is introduced to augment the prod- ucts of desired range hydrocarbons such as C 2 –C 4 olefins. In the development of iron-based catalyst, various prepa- ration parameters such as the composition of active com- ponents, the nature of active metal precursors, the amount J.-Y. Cheon  J. W. Bae (&)  S.-J. Park  K.-W. Jun  G. Murali Dhar Petroleum Displacement Technology Research Center, Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT), P.O. Box 107, Sinseongno 19, Yuseong, Daejeon 305-600, Korea e-mail: finejw@krict.re.kr S.-H. Kang Plant Engineering Center, Institute for Advances Engineering (IAE), Suwon, Kyonggi-do 443-749, Korea J.-Y. Cheon  K.-Y. Lee (&) Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Korea University, Anam-dong, Sungbuk-ku, Seoul 136-701, Republic of Korea e-mail: kylee@prosys.korea.ac.kr 123 Catal Lett (2010) 134:233–241 DOI 10.1007/s10562-009-0241-3