Kinetic interactions between H2 and CO in catalytic oxidation over PdO
Introduction
Combustion of syngas, a gas mixture primarily consisting of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, has drawn much attention in recent years as an environmentally clean fuel that can facilitate reduced emissions in gas turbines of power generation systems [1], [2], [3], [4]. Specifically, greenhouse gas emissions can be controlled via pre-combustion CO2 capture, accomplished by reforming of natural gas or gasification of solid biomasses to syngas, subsequently converting large part of the produced CO to CO2 in a water–gas-shift reactor (WGS) and finally capturing the formed CO2 prior to combustion [5,6]. Another method of mitigating CO2 emissions in gas turbines is the post-combustion capture of CO2, which is typically accomplished with flue gas recycle (FGR); in this case the addition of high-hydrogen content syngas is very beneficial, as it increases the reactivity of the heavily-diluted reactant stream [7]. Syngas fuels are also suited for the enhancement of combustion stability and emission reduction in automotive internal combustion engines [8] and micro-scale portable power generation systems [9].
Of particular interest for the present investigation are the hybrid catalytic/gaseous combustion methodologies, as they can mitigate flame flashback of the very reactive high-hydrogen content syngas fuels inside the channels of typical honeycomb catalytic reactors [10]. In both pre- and post-combustion CO2 capture methods, catalytic reactions can be utilized with the catalytically stabilized thermal combustion (CST) concept, in which fractional fuel conversion is achieved heterogeneously in a reactor that is typically coated with a noble metal, while the remaining fuel is subsequently consumed homogeneously in a gaseous combustion zone [11]. Furthermore, CO addition is of special benefit in H2-fueled catalytic reactors as it moderates the surface superadiabaticity induced by the diffusional imbalance of hydrogen [9,12] thus facilitating reactor design and thermal management [1,13].
Palladium is a widely used noble metal catalyst for methane oxidation [13], [14], [15], [16]. Furthermore, because of its superior low-temperature activity in methane oxidation, palladium-based catalysts have been prime choices as front-face catalysts in natural gas fueled turbine combustors as well as microreactors [14,17,18]. Recently, a non-monotonic pressure dependence of the methane catalytic reactivity on PdO was observed [18,19], which is contrary to the monotonically increasing pressure dependence of the methane reactivity on other noble metals (Pt, Rh) [20,21], while a microkinetic model was developed for methane oxidation over PdO that captures the hysteresis in PdO/Pd decomposition and re-oxidation [22].
In view of the practical importance of the catalytic oxidation of syngas over palladium, and given that several surface reaction mechanisms for the oxidation of simple fuels over palladium have been reported [23], [24], [25], [26], [27], it is timely to conduct dedicated kinetic studies of syngas mixtures on palladium. Such studies are complicated by the intricate interplay between the two fuel components, H2 and CO, and the complex temperature and pressure dependent phase change (Pd/PdOx) of palladium-based catalysts [28,29]. Consequently, the primary objective of the present work is to investigate the heterogeneous kinetics of syngas over palladium-based catalysts and the associated physicochemical interactions between the H2 and CO fuel components.
This paper is organized as follows. First, the adopted experimental and numerical methodologies are introduced in Sections 2 and 3, respectively. Next, the global and detailed reaction parameters for H2 oxidation on PdO, extracted from wire microcalorimetry experiments, are reported in Section 4.1. In Section 4.2 the CO-poisoning effects on the PdO catalyst and the determination of separate H2 and CO reactions over the poisoned catalyst are presented. The combustion of H2/CO mixtures and the kinetic coupling between H2 and CO on PdO surfaces are subsequently discussed in Section 4.3, wherein a detailed syngas reaction mechanism is formulated. The main results are summarized in Section 5.
Section snippets
Experimental
The experiments employed the wire microcalorimetry technique that has been detailed previously [26,30] and is briefly described next. The experimental setup is schematically illustrated in Fig. 1(a). A pre-oxidized polycrystalline PdO wire, 100 µm in diameter and 100 mm in length, is positioned horizontally in the center of a fixed-pressure closed rectangular chamber (with horizontal cross-stream area of 200 × 200 mm2 and height of 200 mm). The gaseous environment is perpetually replenished
Numerical
In the numerical part, two investigations have been pursued. First, 2D simulations over half the y-z domain (schematic of the computational domain is shown in Fig. 1(b) and details in [32]) with the Fluent code were carried out; the code has been validated against past wire microcalorimetry experiments [26,27,32,33] in simulations with detailed methane catalytic and gas-phase reaction mechanisms. Gravity in the y-direction was included in the simulations. In the present work, a detailed
Reaction parameters of H2 oxidation on PdO
Global reaction parameters of H2 oxidation over PdO were first extracted from the heat release measurements. To ensure negligible changes in the heat transfer properties of the reactive mixtures and air [40] and to avoid distortion from the moisture accumulated in the PdO porous structure, only up to 1.0% vol. H2 was doped into air. Self-inhibiting kinetic effect [23] of H2 on the catalytic ignition over PdO was observed, with measured ignition temperatures 380 K, 385 K and 389 K for H2
Conclusions
Using fine-tuned wire microcalorimetry experiments and simulations, global and elementary reaction parameters were derived for the oxidation of separate H2 and CO fuels as well as H2CO fuel blends over PdO catalysts, leading to a detailed catalytic reaction mechanism for syngas oxidation on PdO. The PdO surface was partially deactivated due to CO-poisoning, resulting in reduced H2 catalytic reactivity. The kinetic coupling of H2 and CO oxidation developed from an inhibiting two-sided effect due
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the assistance in micro-GC measurements from Prof. Yiguang Ju's group at Princeton University. RS is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation EPM fellowship (Award Number 178619). LZ acknowledges the use of the computer time allocation at Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) supported through the US National Science Foundation (Award Number CHE160084).
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