Thermal characterisation of a power to methanol reactor
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Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu |
Master's thesis
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Authors
Date
2022-08-22
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Master’s programme in Energy Storage
Language
en
Pages
58+15
Series
Abstract
Synthetic methanol produced from CO2 and H2 is one of the technical solutions necessary to combat anthropogenic climate change. It can replace fossil fuel feedstocks currently used in the chemical industry and be used as an alternative fuel in some types of engines and turbines. Because of this, methanol synthesis has recently gained increased attention from researchers of industry and academia. This thesis covers the topic of heat transfer in a laboratory scale power to methanol reactor, which was built with the purpose to investigate different catalysts and working conditions for synthetic methanol production. The design and construction of the reactor setup was a subject of a previous master thesis. The focus of this thesis is computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling of transient heat transfer in a fixed bed catalytic reactor with a simplistic and effective approach. The experimental setup is shortly introduced, and the experimental methods of early stage reactor operation are presented. Calibrating a CFD model with experimental data is a further part of this thesis, the aim of which is to achieve representative simulation accuracy. Afterwards, the results from measurements are presented. The CFD model is used to recreate the experiments, with the intention to extrapolate preceding temperature results to the whole reactor volume. After calibration, the model achieved sufficiently low simulation error of reactor’s bed temperature (< 10°C), both in steady state and transient operation. With that, its readiness to aid future experiment planning and ensuring safety of operation has been achieved. Methanol % yield of steady state operation was estimated as 8.6%.Description
Supervisor
Santasalo-Aarnio, AnnukkaThesis advisor
Toldy, ArpadSpecchia, Stefania
Keywords
methanol, e-methanol, synthetic fuel, thermal analysis, heat transfer, experimental reactor