Process Intensification Through Heat-Integrated Reactors for High-Temperature Millisecond Contact-Time Catalysis

Abstract

Multifunctional reactor concepts can lead to significant process intensification by integrating more than one unit operation in one apparatus. Particularly heat-integrated reactor concepts have already found fairly wide-spread application in practice, typically for reactions where the adiabatic temperature rise does not allow auto-thermal reactor operation. In contrast to that, we demonstrate that heat-integrated reactor concepts are in fact ideally suited to the extreme conditions of auto-thermal high-temperature millisecond contact-time catalysis. We demonstrate that thermodynamic limitations in catalytic partial oxidation of methane to synthesis gas as well as kinetic limitations in the oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane to ethylene at high-temperature conditions can be overcome via regenerative heat-integration in a reverse-flow reactor. Strong improvements in product yields in comparison to conventionally operated fixed bed reactors are obtained while maintaining the compactness of the short contact-time reactor and keeping the process independent of external heat sources. Overall, the application of heat-integrated reactors to high-temperature catalysis opens to strongly intensified processes.