Catalytic methane combustion in plate-type microreactors with different channel configurations: An experimental study

Li He,Yilin Fan,Jérôme Bellettre,Jun Yue,Lingai Luo

doi:10.1016/j.ces.2021.116517

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study on the catalytic methane combustion (CMC) in plate-type microreactors with wall-coated Pt/γ-Al2O3 catalyst. Firstly, the influence of different operational conditions and coating properties on the CMC in the straight parallel-channel microreactor has been investigated. A specific catalyst loading of 57.6 g m−2 was found to yield the highest methane conversion over 3.5 wt% Pt/γ-Al2O3. A higher or lower loading tended to decrease the methane conversion due to either the limited internal diffusion through the thicker coating layer or insufficient active sites in the thinner coating layer. Then, the above microreactor was compared with other five different geometries, including cavity, double serpentine microchannels, obstacled microchannels, meshed circuit and vascular network. The double serpentine microchannel geometry presented the highest methane conversion (especially at a relatively low mixture flow rate) due to the appropriate control over the residence time and catalyst coating surface area.

Highlights

Natural gas has been reported to have a largest increment in consumption in the past decade, accounting for nearly half of the increase in global energy demand in year 2018 [1,2,3]
In our previous study [46], the straight parallel channel microreactor of a larger dimension (317.5 mm length × 50 mm width × 3 mm height) with washcoated Pt/γ-Al2O3 catalyst has been investigated for the catalytic methane combustion (CMC)
2 An experimental investigation has been firstly performed for the CMC in the straight parallel 3 channel microreactor with washcoated Pt/γ-Al2O3 catalyst

Summary

Introduction

Natural gas has been reported to have a largest increment in consumption in the past decade, accounting for nearly half of the increase in global energy demand in year 2018 [1,2,3]. The harmful impacts of these emissions on the human health and environment have been well recognized [8] and the applicable regulations over EU countries have become more and more stringent in recent years [9]. In this context, the catalytic methane combustion (CMC) as a promising alternative has received increasing attention [10]. These existing CMC studies distinguish themselves by focusing on the catalyst development [16,17,18,19] and mechanisms [20,21,22,23,24], different types of catalytic reactors [25,26,27,28,29] and (optimized) reaction conditions [30,31,32,33], as well as the target applications [29,34,35]

Methods

Results

Conclusion