Higher alcohol synthesis (HAS) from syngas or biomass-derived syngas is an important process for the production of oxygenate fuels, fuel additives and other intermediates for valueded chemical feedstock to produce medicine, cosmetics, lubricants, detergents, and polyesters. Chapter I reviews biomass to liquid fuels technology, higher alcohols being used as alternative fuels and fuel additives, the historical perspective and commercial status of higher alcohols, the catalyst system and the reaction mechanism for HAS from syngas. Chapter II discusses the Zn-Mn promoted Cu-Fe based catalyst that was synthesized by the co-precipitation method. The reaction temperature has been tested to study the influence on the catalytic performance. The maximal CO conversion rate was 72%, and the yield of alcohol and hydrocarbon was also very high. Cu was the active site for alcohol synthesis, iron carbide was the active site for olefin and paraffin synthesis. The reaction mechanism of HAS from syngas over Zn-Mn promoted Cu-Fe based catalyst was proposed. Chapter III documents the three-dimensionally ordered macroporous (3DOM) Cu-Fe catalyst developed using a glyoxylate route colloidal crystal template method. The high intrinsic activity was ascribed to three factors. First, the unique ordered structure has a large pore size and interconnected macroporous tunnels of the catalyst with a large accessible surface area to improve the catalytic activity. Second, a high density of uniformly distributed defective Cu0 and Fe5C2 nanoparticles derived from the glyoxylate route helps to provide abundant, active, and stable dual sites. Third, atomic steps on the Cu surface, induced by planar defects and lattice strain, serve as high-activity oxygenation sites. Active Fe5C2 chain-growth sites intimately surround the defective and strained form of the Cu surface, which results in a synergetic effect between the active and stable Cu–FexCy dual site for HAS. In Chapter IV, in situ ambient pressure x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and in situ synchrotron powder diffraction were applied to identify the active site of 3DOM Cu-Fe catalyst for HAS. The results show that after syngas pretreatment of the 3DOM Cu-Fe catalyst, Cu0 is the active oxygenation site for alcohol synthesis, and Fe5C2 is the active site for carbon chain growth.

The muffle furnace main purpose is to anneal the rough sponge iron powder transported through it, which is done by burning natural gas. Heat is absorbed by the muffle and is transferred to the bed of sponge iron powder. In order to reduce the consumptions of fossil fuel, some companies of the industry aims to exchange the natural gas in their muffle furnace’s burners to syngas, produced from biomass. This will however affect the performance of the furnace in the heating aspect. For this work, it is assumed that the effect will be negative. Thus the aim of this study is to investigate how to compensate the loss of effect from the burners, by examining which other parameters have influence on the furnace heating performance of the sponge iron powder transported through the furnace. The investigation is executed by simulating a 1 meter of the furnace in COMSOL multiphysics for 10 min, not including the combustion chambers. The investigated parameters are the packing degree of the powder, surface emissivity of the muffle, process gas velocity, conveyor belt velocity and the heat transfer rate coefficient to muffle from the combustion chambers. Alas, the process gas velocity and conveyor belt velocity only have minor influence on the final result, according to this simulation. However, the simulation exhibited that the surface emissivity of the muffle and the packing degree of the powder has great impact on the heating of the powder and could compensate some of the lost effect from the burners. This could be obtained by using an unpolished and oxidized muffle surface, and use densely packed powder sample.

Biofuel production via fermentation is produced primarily by fermentation of simple sugars. Besides the sugar fermentation route, there exists a promising alternative process that uses syngas (CO, H2, CO2) produced from biomass as building blocks for biofuels. Although syngas fermentation has many benefits, there are several challenges that still need to be addressed in order for syngas fermentation to become a viable process for producing biofuels on a large scale. One challenge is mass transfer limitations due to low solubilities of syngas species. The hollow fiber reactor (HFR) is one type of reactor that has the potential for achieving high mass transfer rates for biofuels production. However, a better understanding of mass transfer limitations in HFRs is still needed. In addition there have been relatively few studies performing actual fermentations in an HFR to assess whether high mass transfer rates equate to better fermentation results. Besides mass transfer, one other difficulty with syngas fermentation is understanding the role that CO and H2 play as electron donors and how different CO and H2 ratios effect syngas fermentation. In addition to electrons from CO and H2, electrodes can also be used to augment the supply of electrons or provide the only source of electrons for syngas fermentation. This work performed an in depth reactor comparison that compared mass transfer rates and fermentation abilities. The HFR achieved the highest oxygen mass transfer coefficient (1062 h-1) compared to other reactors. In fermentations, the HFR showed very high production rates (5.3 mMc/hr) and ethanol to acetic acid ratios (13) compared to other common reactors. This work also analyzed the use of electrons from H2 and CO by C. ragsdalei and to study the effects of these two different electron sources on product formation and cell growth. This study showed that cell growth is not largely effected by CO composition although there must be at least some minimum amount of CO present (between 5-20%). Interestingly, H2 composition has no effect on cell growth. Also, more electron equivalents will lead to higher product formation rates. Following Acetyl-CoA formation, H2 is only used for product formation but not cell growth. In addition to these studies on electrons from H2 and CO, this work also assessed the redox states of methyl viologen (MV) for use as an artificial electron carrier in applications such as syngas fermentation. A validated thermodynamic model was presented in order to illustrate the most likely redox state of MV depending on the system setup. Variable MV extinction coefficients and standard redox potentials reported in literature were assessed to provide recommended values for modeling and analysis. Model results showed that there are narrow potential ranges in which MV can change from one redox state to another, thus affecting the potential use as an artificial electron carrier.

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Syngas consisting mainly of a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and other diluents, is an important fuel for power generation applications since it can be obtained from both biomass and coal gasification. Clean coal technologies require stable and efficient operation of syngas-fired gas turbines. The trapped vortex combustor (TVC) is a relatively new gas turbine combustor concept which shows tremendous potential in achieving stable combustion under wide operating conditions with low emissions. In the present work, combustion of low calorific value syngas in a TVC has been studied using in-situ laser diagnostic techniques and numerical modeling. Specifically, this work reports in-situ measurements of mixture fraction, OH radical concentration and velocity in a single cavity TVC, using state-of-the art laser diagnostic techniques such as Planar Laser-induced Fluorescence (PLIF) and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). Numerical simulations using the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) approaches have also been carried out to complement the experimental measurements. The fuel-air momentum flux ratio (MFR), where the air momentum corresponds to that entering the cavity through a specially-incorporated flow guide vane, is used to characterize the mixing. Acetone PLIF experiments show that at high MFRs, the fuel-air mixing in the cavity is very minimal and is enhanced as the MFR reduces, due to a favourable vortex formation in the cavity, which is corroborated by PIV measurements. Reacting flow PIV measurements which differ substantially from the non-reacting cases primarily because of the gas expansion due to heat release show that the vortex is displaced from the centre of the cavity towards the guide vane. The MFR was hence identified as the controlling parameter for mixing in the cavity. Quantitative OH concentration contours showed that at higher MFRs 4.5, the fuel jet and the air jet stream are separated and a flame front is formed at the interface. As the MFR is lowered to 0.3, the fuel air mixing increases and a flame front is formed at the bottom and downstream edge of the cavity where a stratified charge is present. A flame stabilization mechanism has been proposed which accounts for the wide MFRs and premixing in the mainstream as well. LES simulations using a flamelet-based combustion model were conducted to predict mean OH radical concentration and velocity along with URANS simulations using a modified Eddy dissipation concept model. The LES predictions were observed to agree closely with experimental data, and were clearly superior to the URANS predictions as expected. Performance characteristics in the form of exhaust temperature pattern factor and pollutant emissions were also measured. The NOx emissions were found to be less than 2 ppm, CO emissions below 0.2% and HC emissions below 700 ppm across various conditions. Overall, the in-situ experimental data coupled with insight from simulations and the exhaust measurements have confirmed the advantages of using the TVC as a gas turbine combustor and provided guidelines for stable and efficient operation of the combustor with syngas fuel.

L'efficacité globale du procédé de vaporeformage du gaz naturel est affectée par la limitation au transfert thermique au sein du lit catalytique et la génération d'un excès de vapeur d'eau non valorisable. Une des clés possibles pour le rentabiliser davantage consiste à optimiser les transferts thermiques en faisant évoluer le design du réacteur. Un échangeur-réacteur microstructuré a ainsi été retenu. Cet appareil de par la taille submillimétrique de ses canaux permet d'intensifier les transferts de chaleur et de matière. Cependant, la modification de l'architecture traditionnelle oblige à développer de nouveaux catalyseurs (MgAl2O4) déposables dans les microcanaux et permettant d'atteindre conversion élevées (80%, 20 bar, 850°C) à faibles temps de passage (150 ms). La faisabilité du concept et la performance des catalyseurs ont été validées sur un canal dans les conditions industrielles du procédé. Un modèle de réacteur piston hétérogène a été utilisé pour estimer la cinétique de la réaction de reformage. Pour le design de l'échangeur-réacteur, deux approches de modélisation ont été développées en considérant l'équilibre thermodynamique à la surface du catalyseur ou en tenant compte du couplage entre la réaction et les transferts de chaleur et de matière. La simulation de ces modèles a permis de proposer la géométrie des canaux qui correspond au design optimal. Deux méthodologies de design ont été développées ainsi qu'un modèle permettant d'interpréter les résultats expérimentaux en tenant compte de la possibilité du bouchage des canaux. L'échangeur-réacteur fabriqué permet de réduire le coût de production pour une unité fonctionnant sans export de vapeur / Steam Methane Reforming (SMR) of natural gas is characterized by generation of an excess of steam and their low thermal efficiency resulting in a very large device with important heat losses. One of the possible keys to make this process more profitable is to optimize heat transfer by changing the reactor design. A microstructured heat exchanger reactor has been retained. It enables to have fast heat and mass transfers and therefore allow increasing catalytic activity. However, this change in production technology must be accompanied by the development of highly active catalysts (MgAl2O4) that enable to reach high methane conversion (80%, 20 bar, 850°C) at low residence time (150 ms). The concept feasibility and catalysts performance have been validated on one channel in industrial process conditions. Then, a detailed model for acquisition of reaction kinetics has been developed and validated from experimental catalytic tests. For heat exchanger reactor design, two modeling approaches have been developed: by considering that the catalyst is highly active and enables to reach instantaneous equilibrium conversion on the coated catalytic walls of the reactor and by tacking the measured kinetics. Simulation of these models by considering technical constraints on the design enabled to find channel characteristic dimensions, heat power needed and the optimum number of channel which determine the heat exchanger reactor volume. Two fast methods for preliminary design of heat-exchanger reactors have been developed. By using heat exchanger reactor, it is possible to suppress steam excess generation and to reduce syngas production cost

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:42:13Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TiagoRC_DISSERT.pdf: 2194143 bytes, checksum: 2a20949c899c91ba3e574d7f71d319d4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-04-11 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient?fico e Tecnol?gico / Oxygen carriers are metal oxides which have the ability to oxidize and reduce easily by various cycles. Due to this property these materials are widely usedin Chemical-Looping Reforming processes to produce H2 and syngas. In this work supports based on MCM-41 and La-SiO2 were synthesized by hydrothermal method. After the synthesis step they were calcined at 550?C for 2 hours and characterized by TG, XRD, surface area using the BET method and FTIR spectroscopy. The deposition of active phase, in this case Nickel, took place in the proportions of 5, 10 and 20% by weight of metallic nickel, for use as oxygen carriers.The XRD showed that increasing in the content of Ni supported on MCM-41 resulted in a decrease in spatial structure and lattice parameter of the material. The adsorption and desorption curves of the MCM-41 samples exhibited variations with the increase of Ni deposited. Surface area, average pore diameter and wall density of silica showed significant changes , due to the increase of the active phase on the mesoporous material. By other hand, in the samples with La-SiO2 composition was not observed peaks characteristic of hexagonal structure, in the XRD diffractogram. The adsorption/desorption isotherms of nitrogen observed are type IV, characteristic of mesoporous materials. The catalytic test indicates that the supports have no influence in the process, but the nickel concentration is very important, because the results for minor concentration of nickel are not good. The ratio H2/O2 was close to 2, for all 15 cycles involving the test storage capacity of O2, indicating that the materials are effective for oxygen transport / Transportadores de oxig?nio s?o ?xidos met?licos que possuem a capacidade de oxidar e reduzir facilmente por diversos ciclos. Devido a essa propriedade estes materiais s?o bastante utilizados nos processos de Chemical-Looping Reforming para a produ??o de H2 ou g?s de s?ntese (H2 mais CO). Neste trabalho foram sintetizados os suportes MCM-41 e La-SiO2 pelo o m?todo hidrot?rmico. Os materiais resultantes foram calcinados a 550 ?C por 2 horas e, posteriormente, caracterizados por TG, DRX, ?rea superficial pelo m?todo BET e FTIR. Ap?s a caracteriza??o dos suportes foi feita a deposi??o da fase ativa (Ni) com as propor??es de 5, 10 e 20% em massa de n?quel met?lico, para aplica??o como transportadores de oxig?nio. As an?lises de DRX mostraram que o aumento do teor de Ni suportado em MCM-41 deu origem a uma diminui??o no ordenamento estrutural e no par?metro de rede do material. As amostras MCM-41 apresentaram varia??es quanto ?s curvas de adsor??o/dessor??o de nitrog?nio, ?rea superficial, di?metro m?dio de poros e espessura da parede de s?lica, em fun??o do aumento da fase ativa no material mesoporoso. Enquanto que nas amostras com La-SiO2 n?o se observou picos caracter?sticos da estrutura hexagonal, nos difratogramas de DRX. Entretanto, as curvas de adsor??o/dessor??o de nitrog?nio observadas s?o do tipo IV, caracter?stico de materiais mesoporosos. Os resultados dos testes dos transportadores indicam que o suporte n?o influenciou no processo catal?tico. A raz?o H2/O2 foi pr?xima de 2, durante todos os 15 ciclos envolvendo o teste de capacidade de armazenamento de O2 , indicando que os materiais s?o eficientes para o transporte de oxig?nio estrutural e no par?metro de rede do material. As amostras MCM-41 apresentaram varia??es quanto ?s curvas de adsor??o/dessor??o de nitrog?nio, ?rea superficial, di?metro m?dio de poros e espessura da parede de s?lica, em fun??o do aumento da fase ativa no material mesoporoso. Enquanto que nas amostras com La-SiO2 n?o se observou picos caracter?sticos da estrutura hexagonal, nos difratogramas de DRX. Entretanto, as curvas de adsor??o/dessor??o de nitrog?nio observadas s?o do tipo IV, caracter?stico de materiais mesoporosos. Os resultados dos testes dos transportadores indicam que o suporte n?o influenciou no processo catal?tico. A raz?o H2/O2 foi pr?xima de 2, durante todos os 15 ciclos envolvendo o teste de capacidade de armazenamento de O2 , indicando que os materiais s?o eficientes para o transporte de oxig?nio