Catalytic cracking of pyrolysis oil oxygenates (aliphatic and aromatic) with vacuum gas oil and their characterization

•Studied the effect of catalyst-to-oil ratio on the catalytic cracking of mixture of vacuum gas oil with acetic acid and guaiacol.•The fraction of aromaticity for acetic acid and guaiacol increases with increase in catalyst-to-oil ratio.•Presence of guaiacol increased the product selectivity of gasoline fraction.•Presence of acetic acid increased the yield of light olefins, carbon mono-oxide and carbon dioxide. In the present work an attempt has been made to study the effect of catalyst-to-oil ratio (C/O) on the product distribution for the catalytic cracking of mixture of vacuum gas oil (VGO) with guaiacol and acetic acid, which are the representative model compounds of the biomass-derived fast pyrolysis oil. The catalytic cracking of mixture of VGO has been carried out using industrially available FCC equilibrium catalyst (E-CAT) in an advanced cracking evaluation ACE-R FCC unit. The FCC feed, distillates and liquid products are analyzed using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and structurally characterized by 1H, gated decoupled 13C NMR methods. The average structural parameters like branchiness index, substitution index, average length of alkyl chains, and fraction of aromaticity per molecule are obtained from NMR data. The SIM distillation based product analysis indicated that the presence of guaiacol increased the product selectivity of gasoline fraction; whereas the presence of acetic acid clearly increased the yield of light olefins, CO and CO2. The 1H and 13C NMR data indicated that the fraction of aromaticity for both Feed B (vacuum gas oil+acetic acid) and Feed C (vacuum gas oil+guaiacol) increased, after catalytic cracking, with increase in C/O ratio from 3 to 9. The equilibrium FCC catalyst is able to crack oxygenates presents in pyrolysis oil such as acetic acid and guaiacol. Further the crackability pattern of pyrolysis oxygenates supported by the vibrations of CO and OH absorption peaks (of FTIR) and NMR data of liquid product.