Simulation of Catalytic Combustion of Methane in a Monolith Honeycomb Reactor

1 INTRODUCTION Monolith honeycomb reactor plays an important role in catalytic combustion[1] such as combustion chambers for gas turbines used in power generation where methane is the main reactant. It contains hun-dreds of parallel channels that are often of the order of 1—2mm in diameter. The catalyst may be dispersed within a washcoat that is coated onto the surface of the channels[2] where catalytic combustion occurs. Com-pared to conventional gas-phase combustion, catalytic combusti…

Simulation of Catalytic Combustion of Methane in a Monolith Honeycomb Reactor

Catalytic combustion of CH4/air in monolith reactor is simulated using a commercial computational fluid dynamic code. The user subroutines to describe the heterogeneous reaction at the channel wall in a single channel and at the channel walls in the whole reactor are incorporated into the program. The correctness of the method is verified by comparing the simulation results with the experimental data for the whole reactor. Furthermore, it is observed that the model based on the whole reactor is more reasonable than that based on a single channel. Therefore, using the former, the effects of operating conditions such as inlet gas velocity, temperature, concentration and catalyst loading on methane conversion are investigated.