Abstract
AbstractA study has been carried out to assess the relative performance characteristics of dense and porous composite membranes for high‐temperature alkane dehydrogenation. Rigorous two‐dimensional mathematical models have been developed and applied to describe the various processes of transport and chemical reaction taking place in these complex novel reactor systems. The orthogonal collocation technique has been used to simulate the industrially important dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene to styrene as the model reaction. The results have clearly demonstrated superior performance of dense composite membranes below a thickness of 50 μm. However, above this thickness porous composite systems are preferable in terms of conversion enhancement, but all the systems depict identical performance at a separation layer thickness of 150 μm. The performance of the systems is also studied by obtaining the conversion level as a function of the contact time parameter using various feed compositions. These findings have demonstrated that exclusive hydrogen permeability is important, provided the separation layer thickness is not too great.
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