High-temperature steam reforming commercial

Based on the type of thermal destruction process selected, there are several different commercial designs and configurations of the reactor that have been utilized for a particular application. Some of the most commonly used technologies include rotary kilns, starved air incinerators, fluidized beds, mass-bum incinerators, electrically heated reactors, microwave reactors, plasma, and other high-temperature thermal destruction systems. Recent advances include gasification and very high temperature steam reforming. 

However, many reactions of commercial interest have chemistry, mechanical, or system requirements that preclude the use of cross-flow reactors. Processes cannot use a cross-flow orientation primarily because of high temperatures and the need to internally recuperate heat such as steam methane reforming (SMR) [12, 13] and oxidation reactions [14]. Counter- and coflow devices require a micromanifold to dehver sufficiently uniform flow to each of the many parallel channels. 

Banks, Paterson, and Williams of British Gas have described951 the preparation and properties of a coprecipitated Ni-Al203 catalyst (50 wt% Ni) to which were added 1.0 wt% of an alkali metal and 0.5 wt% of ruthenium. This material was shown to have desirable properties when used for the steam reforming of a hydrocarbon oil in the temperature range 410-476 °C. It is, however, not very likely that such a catalyst will be used commercially because of the high cost of ruthenium and the limited supplies of this metal which are available. Another British Gas patent, referred to previously, introduces chromium into the formulation to improve the stability of the resultant catalyst.77... 

Steam reforming of hydrocarbons has become the most widely used process for producing hydrogen. One of the chief problems In the process Is the deposition of coke on the catalyst. To control coke deposition, high steam to hydrocarbon ratios, n, are used. However, excess steam must be recycled and It Is desirable to minimize the magnitude of the recycle stream for economy. Most of the research on this reaction has focused mainly on kinetic and mechanistic considerations of the steam-methane reaction at high values of n to avoid carbon deposition ( L 4). Therefore, the primary objective of this studyis to determine experimentally the minimum value of n for the coke-free operation at various temperatures for a commercial catalyst. 

Skeletal Cu-Zn catalysts show great potential as alternatives to coprecipitated Cu0-Zn0-Al203 catalysts used commercially for low temperature methanol synthesis and water gas shift (WGS) reactions. They can also be used for other reactions such as steam reforming of methanol, methyl formate production by dehydrogenation of methanol, and hydrogenolysis of alkyl formates to produce alcohols. In all these reactions zinc oxide-promoted skeletal copper catalysts have been found to have high activity and selectivity. 

The commercial production of hydrogen is carried out by treating natural gas with steam at high temperatures and in the presence of a catalyst ( steam reforming of methane ) ... 

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