Scale-Up of Innovative Honeycomb Reactors for Power-to-Gas Applications - The Project Store&Go.

The German "Energiewende" is heavily based on electric power and, therefore, requests solutions to serve non-electric energy uses and to store electric energy in large scale. Synthetic natural gas (SNG) produced with hydrogen from water electrolysis and with CO2 from mainly renewable sources is one approach. For the catalytic SNG production efficient removal and utilization of the reaction heat is the main issue. A metallic honeycomb-like carrier-based reactor proved in laboratory scale to match this challenge. This type of reactor shows good heat conductivity and enables optimized operation. In the EU-funded project Store&Go the honeycomb methanation is scaled up to MW-scale. For this, heat transfer and kinetic data were determined experimentally and used in CFD calculations for the reactor design. Finally a SNG plant with 1 MW feed-in will be built and fully integrated operation will be shown.

Investigation of hydrogenation of toluene to methylcyclohexane in a trickle bed reactor by low-field nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Low-field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is applied to study the hydrogenation of toluene in a lab-scale reactor. A conventional benchtop NMR system was modified to achieve chemical shift resolution. After an off-line validity check of the approach, the reaction product is analyzed on-line during the process, applying chemometric data processing. The conversion of toluene to methylcyclohexane is compared with off-line gas chromatographic analysis. Both classic analytical and chemometric data processing was applied. As the results, which are obtained within a few tens of seconds, are equivalent within the experimental accuracy of both methods, low-field NMR spectroscopy was shown to provide an analytical tool for reaction characterization and immediate feedback.

Modeling of acetylene pyrolysis under steel vacuum carburizing conditions in a tubular flow reactor.

In the present work, the pyrolysis of acetylene was studied under steel vacuum carburizing conditions in a tubular flow reactor. The pyrolysis temperature ranged from 650 degrees C to 1050 degrees C. The partial pressure of acetylene in the feed mixture was 10 and 20 mbar, respectively, while the rest of the mixture consisted of nitrogen. The total pressure of the mixture was 1.6 bar. A kinetic mechanism which consists of seven species and nine reactions has been used in the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software Fluent. The species transport and reaction model of Fluent was used in the simulations. A comparison of simulated and experimental results is presented in this paper.

Determination of porosity and flow distribution in packed beds by magnetic resonance imaging.

Magnetic resonance methods have been used to investigate the porosity and flow distributions in packed beds. The motivation of our study is to understand the behaviour of multiphase flow in fixed bed reactors, especially in trickle bed reactors. The results of this study should be included in a model for predicting the influence of hydrodynamics on hydrodesulfurization process in bench-scale reactors.