Experimental Investigation of Plasma Assisted Reforming of Propane
Plasmatron fuel converters have been investigated for the conversion of a wide range of fuels. This paper is one of a series of paper investigating the performance of plasmatron reformers. In this paper a systematic experimental investigation is carried out of the reformation of propane in a plasmatron fuel reformer. The effect upon reformation of flow rate distribution and electrical power level are investigated for a given geometry that has been thoroughly studied with a similar gaseous fuel, methane. A limited set of startup experiments with propane are discussed
Plasma Assisted Reforming of Methane: Two Stage Perfectly Stirred Reactor (PSR) Simulation
Plasmatron fuel converters have been investigated for the conversion of a wide range of fuels. This paper is one of a series describing an experimental and computational study of plasmatron methane reformers. A simple model using a two step process has been proposed for investigating homogeneous reformation of methane using partial oxidation reactions. In the first step, a fraction of the fuel is combusted, while during the second the rest of the fuel is reformed. The purpose of the simple model is to provide limited understanding of uncatalyzed methane reformation using plasma fuel reformers. The implications of kinetic rates, as well as mixing rates, are explored. This paper describes model and results of simple two step process, used to provide guidance to experiments as well as more sophisticated calculations in an accompanying papers. Comparison with experimental results with a plasmatron methane reformer are also presented.
The relevance of thermokinetic interactions and numerical modeling to the homogeneous partial oxidation of methane
Both a two-dimensional thermokinetic model and a detailed multidimensional one, only tractable by numerical computation, are applied to the high-pressure, low-temperature, noncatalytic, direct partial oxidation of methane in a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR). It is shown that all the phenomena encountered experimentally in this system so far can be accounted for qualitatively by the two-dimensional model and semiquantitatively by the numerical approach. These phenomena include the parametric dependencies of methanol selectivity and yield and the occurrence and significance of hysteresis, bifurcation, oscillation, and extinction, of the direct partial oxidation reaction.