A Multistage Fluidized Bed for the Deep Removal of Sour Gases: Proof of Concept and Tray Efficiencies.

Currently there are significant amounts of natural gas that cannot be produced and treated to meet pipeline specifications, because that would not be economically viable. This work investigates a bench scale multistage fluidized bed (MSFB) with shallow beds for sour gas removal from natural gas using a commercially available supported amine sorbent. A MSFB is regarded as a promising adsorber type for deep sour gas removal to parts per million concentrations. A series of experiments was conducted using carbon dioxide as sour gas and nitrogen to mimic natural gas. Removal below 3 mol ppm was successfully demonstrated. This indicates that gas bypassing is minor (that is, good gas-solid contacting) and that apparent adsorption kinetics are fast for the amine sorbent applied. Tray efficiencies for a chemisorption/adsorption system were reported for one of the first times. Current experiments performed at atmospheric pressure strongly indicate that deep removal is possible at higher pressures in a multistage fluidized bed.

Intrinsic photocatalytic assessment of reactively sputtered TiO2 films.

Thin TiO2 films were prepared by DC magnetron reactive sputtering at different oxygen partial pressures. Depending on the oxygen partial pressure during sputtering, a transition from metallic Ti to TiO2 was identified by spectroscopic ellipsometry. The crystalline nature of the film developed during a subsequent annealing step, resulting in thin anatase TiO2 layers, displaying photocatalytic activity. The intrinsic photocatalytic activity of the catalysts was evaluated for the degradation of methylene blue (MB) using a microfluidic reactor. A numerical model was employed to extract the intrinsic reaction rate constants. High conversion rates (90% degradation within 20 s residence time) were observed within these microreactors because of the efficient mass transport and light distribution. To evaluate the intrinsic reaction kinetics, we argue that mass transport has to be accounted for. The obtained surface reaction rate constants demonstrate very high reactivity for the sputtered TiO2 films. Only for the thinnest film, 9 nm, slightly lower kinetics were observed.