September 07, 2022
16:15
Louvain-la-Neuve
Place Sainte Barbe, auditorium BARB94
For the degree of Doctor of Engineering Sciences and Technology
The autothermal chemical looping reforming (aCLR) is an alternative technology to steam methane reforming (SMR) and partial oxidation of methane (POM) aiming at solving CO2 capture and improving their energy efficiency. The successful demonstrations of aCLR use mostly the toxic Ni-based or Ni-containing oxygen carriers that is problematic. Other oxygen carriers, e.g., Fe-based and Cu-based OCs, suffer from either low fuel conversion and/or agglomeration.
This thesis proposed the catalyst-enhanced aCLR, an environmentally compatible realization of aCLR, which uses Fe-based OC for oxygen transport and Rh-based catalyst for methane conversion. The intrinsic reaction kinetics of the Rh-based catalyst, the oxidation kinetics of the 
Fe-based OC are studied in a fixed bed reactor and the kinetics parameters are carefully estimated. This novel process is studied via multi-scale modeling that accounts for the detailed mechanisms, mass transfer between the emulsion gas and the catalyst particles, the mass transfer between the bubble phase and the emulsion phase, and the residence time distribution of OC particles on the reduction. This study found the novel catalyst-enhanced aCLR feasible, revealed the relative importance of kinetics and operating parameters, and provides a tool to analyze, design and optimize the aCLR/catalyst-enhance aCLR process efficiently.
Jury members :
- Prof. Juray Dewilde (UCLouvain, Belgium), supervisor
- Prof. Renaud Ronsse (UCLouvain, Belgium), chairperson
- Prof. Joris Proost (UCLouvain, Belgium)
- Prof. Mark Saeys (Ghent University, Belgium)
- Prof. Lunbo Duan (Southeast University, China)
- Dr. Arthur Pozarlik (University of Twente, Netherlands)