Deactivation of Combustion Catalysts

One of the main hurdles for combustion catalysts is to maintain the catalytic activity, during prolonged operation. Typically, gas turbine manufacturers demand at least one-year-operation, e.g. 8000 h for stationary gas turbines and approximately the same number of hours for mobile applications. Combustion catalysts will be exposed to severe conditions, i.e. gas velocities around 10-25 m s , peak temperatures between 1000 and 1400 °C depending on the system design, transients with temperature drops around 500 °C s or higher, and fuel mixtures that can contain known catalyst poisons. Hence, the catalysts could be deactivated by  

Approximate title sorted chronologically Patent no. and holder Brief remark 

1998 Catalytic combustors containing palladium and manganese for gas turbines JP 10047610 Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. Pd-containing catalyst as an initial stage followed by Mn-containing catalyst with magnetoplumbite structure 

Catalytic method US 5720605, 5720609 W.C. Pfefferle Lean hybrid combustion with very short channels (e.g. Microlith ) 

Palladium oxide combustion catalysts for high temperature uses and their preparation JP 09285730 Petroleum Energy Centre Catalyst system based on PdO supported on 5-alumina 

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The aim with the present paper is to survey the literature on catalytic fuel combustion for high temperature gas turbine applications with emphasis on the progress during the last five years. Reference to work before 1993 can be found in an earlier review from our laboratory. Following a brief introduction to catalytic combustion and a discussion on formation and abatement of emission, state-of-the-art in materials development will be reviewed in Section 3. Recent results from mathematical modelling are covered in Section 4. An update of new concepts of catalytic combustors and advanced pilot-scale tests will be presented in Section 5, where also a case study on a recently finished European project is reported. Finally, deactivation of combustion catalysts is discussed in Section 6 and a spin-off effect of catalytic combustion is recapitulated in Section 7. 

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