Symyx Research for Refining provides companies with small scope, flexible service projects where clients pay per experiment, allowing scientists to access capability when and where they need it.
Symyx has announced the expansion of Symyx Research to include refining R+D services.
The company's expertise is based on more than ten years of catalyst development experience throughout the petrochemical and chemical industries.
"Refiners around the world are facing increasing environmental regulations, decreasing margins, and lower-quality feedstocks.
"It is critically important for chemists and researchers in the refining industry to develop and evaluate new catalysts to address these challenges," said Richard Boehner, president of Symyx Research.
"Refining companies have catalyst experts.
"Symyx Research for Refining provides a means for these scientists to access results for experiments in experimental spaces they define".
Symyx Research for Refining gives companies access to Symyx's installed base of high-throughput experimentation technology and analytics as well as expert staff to synthesise and screen new catalyst libraries or screen client-provided catalysts for catalytic performance.
This flexible, fee-for-service model allows the client to define experiment sets, own the scientific IP and pay no royalties.
Infrastructure available through Symyx Research for Refining includes catalyst research and development capabilities for naphtha hydrodesulphurisation, diesel hydrodesulphurisation (and HDN), reforming, VGO hydrotreating, hydrocracking, lubes hydrotreating and alkylation.
With Symyx Research for Refining, the world's leaders in refining technology can reduce the number of pilot plant runs required for catalyst development by executing lab scale 'pilot plant representative' studies to identify catalysts and conditions that yield greater probabilities of success.
In addition, proprietary fixed-bed reactor technology for gas phase reactions and trickle-bed reactor technology for high conversion studies gives companies representative pilot plant data without investing in additional infrastructure.
"Clients can now access pilot plant quality data from laboratory reactors, using real feedstocks," said Sam Bergh, vice president of engineering, Symyx Technologies.
"This enables researchers to select catalysts with the greatest probability of success without having to perform numerous costly and time-consuming pilot plant runs on each candidate.
"Symyx Research provides not only a service to synthesise catalyst libraries but also to screen those catalysts in only a few months."
