ON THE ANALYSIS OF NONCATALYTIC GAS-SOLID KINETICS DATA HAVING WEAK TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE

Abstract

Noncatalytic gas-solid reactions should exhibit strong temperature dependence when the rate is controlled by surface kinetics. However, there are a number of examples in the literature where apparent activation energies less than 10 kcal/mol have been reported as being representative of intrinsic kinetics. This conclusion is often based on electrobalance data in which large gas Row rates were used to eliminate mass transfer resistance and the fact that fractional conversion-time results are consistent with the surface kinetics control version of a gas-solid reaction model. The oxidation of FeS was studied in an electrobalance reactor as a function of O2 mol fraction, temperature, and gas flow rate. The global rate was first-order in O2 and weakly dependent on temperature and flow rate. Data analysis used the approximate solution to the grain model. The single-resistance surface kinetics variation of the model provided good match with the conversion-time data, but the apparent activation energy was only about 7 kcal/mol. A two-resistance mass transfer-product layer diffusion variation provided equally good match with the data, and the dependence of reaction coefficients on reaction variables was in general agreement with theory.