Experimental study on honeycomb reactor using methane via chemical looping cycle for solar syngas

Abstract

The chemical looping process on honeycomb reactor for solar syngas is experimentally studied in this work, which is the key reaction of the liquid sunshine production process. The honeycomb reactor realizes the integration of oxygen carrier and reaction chamber. NiO is placed in the reactor as oxygen carrier and methane is introduced as fuel gas. The results show that, with the development of process, the major reaction in the reactor gradually changed from methane complete oxidation to methane partial oxidation. During the process, the methane conversion and outlet syngas concentration is affected by the methane flow and fractional oxidation. Under the optimal operating conditions, the methane conversion can be maintained more than 95% and the concentration of outlet syngas can be around 90%. Compared with non-honeycomb fixed bed reactor, the methane conversion increases by more than 20 percent point and the concentration of outlet syngas increases by about 10 percent point. In addition, oxygen carrier in honeycomb reactor shows excellent cyclic stability in 30 times experiments.