Assessment of a catalytic plate reactor with in-situ sampling capabilities by means of CFD modeling and experiments

A catalytic plate reactor with a small movable sampling capillary enables us to gather a significantly larger set of kinetic data for the parameter estimation than using a typical steady-state packed-bed reactor with end-of-pipe measurement. In this study, a reactive three-dimensional CFD model developed with catalyticFOAM is validated by experimental axial gas species concentration profiles and then used to investigate the flow dynamics and study the effect of the immersed capillary for various operating conditions for the CO2 methanation reaction over Ni/Al2O3 catalyst. The results confirmed that the presence of the capillary (diameter 0.5 mm, continuous vs. open-ended) inside the rectangular channel (5 × 40 × 100 mm), the position of the orifice (diameter 0.25 mm), and the suction (2 to 8 ml/min) did not affect the quality of the kinetic data collected. For the current design of the reactor inlet, the flow fully develops within the first 10–25 mm of the reactor domain depending on the total flow rate (100 to 300 mlN/min). Hence, up to 90% of the reactor's length can be used for in-situ measurements. This work demonstrates that our channel reactor is very suitable for collecting kinetic data, especially for fast and exothermic heterogeneous catalyzed reactions, with a high spatial resolution for gas composition and catalyst surface temperature.