Overcoming Catalyst Testing Challenges: Improving Catalyst Durability Testing

By Dr Kurtis Irwin, CEO CATAGEN Green Emissions Testing.

This third article continues our 6-part series, Overcoming Barriers: Confidence in Catalyst Durability, exploring how OEMs and technology partners can move from testing challenges to proven performance.

In our previous blog, we explored the challenge of predicting catalyst lifetime under real operating conditions. But accurate lifetime prediction is only possible when testing methods can reliably replicate the complex thermal, chemical, and transient stressors catalysts experience in service. In this article, we examine the key barriers that make conventional catalyst durability testing slow, costly, and often unrepresentative of real-world operation.

Overcoming Catalyst Testing Challenges: Turning Barriers into Breakthroughs

Executive Summary

Catalyst durability defines the operational stability, efficiency, and profitability of countless industrial processes. Yet traditional ageing tests, whether lab-scale or pilot plant fall short of replicating the complex thermal, chemical and mechanical transients’ catalysts experience in service. This gap in realism leads to uncertainty: slow, costly campaigns that fail to isolate dominant deactivation mechanisms or provide reliable lifetime data.

This blog explores key technical barriers in catalyst testing, from reproducing dynamic thermal cycles to contaminant dosing and repeatability. It shows how CATAGEN’s OMEGA Reactor overcomes these challenges by combining precise thermal, flow, and compositional control with industrially representative stressors. The result is quantitative ageing data that isolates deactivation pathways, validates catalyst tolerance to alternative feeds, and enables predictive maintenance with confidence.

The complexity of catalyst ageing: beyond simple deactivation

Catalyst degradation is multi-mechanistic and highly process-dependent. In real reactors, catalysts are subjected to:

– Dynamic thermal profiles – Start-ups, shutdowns, and load changes impose thermal shocks and gradients that accelerate degradation.

– Feedstock variability – Changes in syngas composition, bio-feed impurities, or refinery feed variability alter local reactions and deposit unexpected by-products.

– Trace poisons at ppm/ppb levels – Sulphur, phosphorus, alkali metals, and halides block catalyst functionality.

– Transient redox environments – For catalysts in reforming, SCR, or SOFC anodes, oscillations between reducing and oxidising conditions can lead to surface changes.

– Mechanical and diffusional stress – High space velocities, differential pressures create mass transfer limitations, escalating reactor pressure drop over time.

This combination of thermal, chemical, and mechanical stressors cannot be fully replicated in simple microreactor tests or static isothermal conditions.

Why conventional testing creates barriers

Traditional catalyst durability testing typically forces teams into a compromise between realism and practicality. Pilot plant campaigns can provide realistic scale and feed conditions, but they are often slow, costly, and difficult to control with precision. Meaningful durability data can take months to generate, while high feedstock and utility demand significantly increase operational costs. At the same time, overlapping process dynamics can make it difficult to isolate specific deactivation pathways or clearly understand the mechanisms driving performance drift.

At the other end of the spectrum, lab-scale rigs and microreactors allow for faster screening and lower-cost testing, but they often oversimplify the reality of industrial operation. Many fail to reproduce the thermal gradients, start-stop dynamics, contaminant exposure, and interacting stressors that catalysts experience in service. Controlled dosing of contaminants at ultra-low ppm levels can also be challenging, limiting the ability to accurately replicate real-world poisoning effects.

Conventional testing platforms may also struggle to precisely vary GHSV, total pressure, or stoichiometry over time, making it difficult to study how degradation evolves across different operating regimes. In addition, variability in feed gas composition, contamination, or transient response can result in poor repeatability between tests, undermining confidence in benchmarking and lifetime prediction.

The outcome is often significant data gaps that force conservative decisions, including premature catalyst replacement, overengineered safety margins, and costly unplanned shutdowns.

How CATAGEN overcomes the barriers

CATAGEN’s OMEGA Reactor addresses these challenges by combining high-fidelity industrial simulation with precise laboratory control. The system uses a recirculating synthetic gas loop to maintain stable, homogeneous gas compositions that replicate reformer syngas, exhaust gas, and hydroprocessing environments, including contaminant species at ppm and ppb resolution.

Programmable thermal cycling allows electrically heated furnaces to reproduce real-world start-stop cycles, hot spots, and transient peaks with temperature uniformity of ±2 °C. Dynamic flow and pressure control enable adjustable GHSV and system pressure to simulate both steady-state and transient kinetic regimes, while targeted contaminant dosing allows controlled introduction of sulphur species, alkali metals, chlorides, and biofeed impurities to isolate poisoning effects.

The platform also incorporates real-time inline analytics, including FTIR and mass flow monitoring, providing continuous feedback on conversion, selectivity, and deactivation markers, while differential pressure monitoring tracks pore blockage evolution over time.

Together, these capabilities enable accelerated yet representative catalyst ageing, generating mechanistic insight that is often masked in pilot plants or missed entirely in conventional lab-scale testing.

The technical breakthroughs OMEGA delivers

OMEGA’s repeatable data allows operators and suppliers to move from conservative guesswork to predictive modelling:

– Maintenance becomes scheduled, not reactive.

– Regeneration cycles are optimised, avoiding thermal overshoot that damage’s structure.

– Warranty and performance guarantees are data-backed, reducing contractual risk.

– Process economics improve, as catalysts are used to their true lifetime potential.

Rather than a costly, slow bottleneck, catalyst durability testing becomes a strategic tool for reliability, compliance, and efficiency.

From barrier to breakthrough

For decades, catalyst durability testing has forced the industry into a compromise between realism, speed, and cost. Pilot plants provide operational realism but are slow and resource-intensive, while lab-scale rigs offer faster screening but often fail to capture the complex stressors catalysts experience in service.

By combining representative operating conditions with precise laboratory control, advanced ageing platforms such as CATAGEN’s OMEGA Reactor help bridge this gap. Engineers can generate repeatable, high-quality durability data that delivers clearer mechanistic understanding, stronger lifetime prediction, and greater confidence in catalyst performance under real-world conditions.

For OEMs, catalyst suppliers, and technology developers, overcoming these testing barriers is essential to reducing risk, improving reliability, and accelerating the deployment of new technologies.

In the next blog, we’ll explore how CATAGEN’s OMEGA Reactor redefines catalyst ageing by combining industrial realism, accelerated testing, and precise control in a single durability platform