Porous Fe layered alumina channel for Chemical Looping Combustion Micro-reactors

Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC) emerges as one
of the novel and most promising technology to
generate power with inherent CO2 separation and
capture. Until now, most research on CLC has been
concentrated on one variant of CLC reactors, namely,
Fluidized-Bed Reactors (FBRs). Recently, there have
been new concepts such as micro-channel based
reactor, studied for chemical looping (CL) concepts.
Here, the oxygen carriers are coated or filled into
porous supports on the surface of a ceramic channel.
The CL cycles are carried by flowing the reducing and
oxidizing gases through these channels. The
advantages of such micro-channel based reactors
include drastically reduced agglomeration, reduced
attrition, high surface area and reaction rates,
reliability, robustness, scalability, durability, and
ability to use advanced engineered nano-material
structures. In this study we investigate a ceramic
alumina channel of ¼” ID, 9” length, coated with a
thin (~250 µm) layer of porous alumina. CL material
iron is embedded into the porous layer by wet
impregnation. CH4 and air are used as reducing and
oxidizing gases respectively. The time resolved
reaction kinetics along the channel will be measured
using a quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS) with a
time resolution of 300 ms and presented. The
experimental data will be used to design a channel
based micro-reactor for CLC.