Spatial profiles at elevated pressure in millisecond contact times reactors for production of syngas

FUEL 183

Anders Bitsch-Larsen, Bitschla@cems.umn.edu, Raimund Horn, Brian Michael, Nick Degenstein, and Lanny D. Schmidt, schmidt@cems.umn.edu. Department of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science, University of Minnesota, 421 Washington AV SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455
The production of syngas from methane by catalytic partial oxidation (CPO) over noble metal catalysts allows for millisecond contact time. These systems exhibit high temperature and concentration gradients making direct measurements difficult at industrially relevant conditions. However, performing scientific measurements as close as possible to conditions seen in industrial application of CPO are important to obtain reliable data for later scale-up. These conditions dictate elevated pressures where homogeneous chemistry comes into effect in addition to the heterogeneous catalytic reactions. In this work we present measurements sampling inside the reactor at pressures up to 1.1MPa with minimal disturbance of the system. The spatial resolution of these measurements is determined by the characteristic length of the support (~300μm) and not the technique itself. It is shown that maintaining the flow rate and increasing the pressure allows one to obtain effluent values closer to equilibrium than is observed at atmospheric pressure.
 

Fuel Processing for Hydrogen Production
8:25 AM-12:05 PM, Wednesday, August 22, 2007 Boston Park Plaza -- Berkeley Rm, Oral

Division of Fuel Chemistry

The 234th ACS National Meeting, Boston, MA, August 19-23, 2007