A new forward-impinging-back reactor for the scale-up of partially decoupled oxidation of ethane to produce ethylene and acetylene

Abstract

Ethane in unconventional natural gas was mainly used as the feedstock of the steam cracking process. In our previous work, a new ethane conversion process named partially decoupled process (PDP) was proposed and investigated by experiments and numerical simulations. In the ethane PDP, coke oven gas or other cheap gas combusts with stoichiometric oxygen as heat carrier, and ethane is mixed with the heat carrier and cracked at a high temperature. In this work, a new type of reactor named Forward-Impinging-Back (FIB) reactor was proposed for a better scale-up performance and investigated by CFD simulations coupled with a detailed reaction mechanism. The simulation results showed that a maximum C2 (C2H2 + C2H4) yield of 65.6% was obtained for the ethane PDP in a FIB reactor. The FIB reactor and Jet-In-Cross-Flow (JICF) reactor of small diameter had similar performance. When the reactor diameter increased from 30 mm to 390 mm, the C2 yield maintained at 64% in the FIB reactor, but decreased from 64.4% to 43.8% in JICF reactor.