Numerical study of methane to acetylene process in novel thermal plasma array reactor

Abstract

Thermal plasma process has been recognized as a clean technology to pyrolyze a wide variety of hydrocarbons to produce light gasses at extreme conditions. To tackle the engineering issues related with scale-up of such an ultra-high temperature reactor, we herein propose a novel design of thermal plasma array reactor (TPAR), which accommodates multiple arcs in staggered array mode inside the reactor with replaceable graphite-rod electrodes. The feed hydrocarbons flow through the arc-intertwined high-temperature zone with anticipated mixing and heat transfer intensification. To illustrate the essential features of the TPAR design, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are carried out to reveal the influence of the reactor design on the mixing and reaction performance using the methane pyrolysis process as a case in the TPAR. It is demonstrated that the energy consumption for the methane to acetylene production can achieve satisfactory results in a rather simplified TPAR design.