does anyone here have any experience with and suggestions for tube reactor designs for bench top gas-to-liquids experiments?
we're putting one of these test rigs together to run all the usual catalysts tests towards the near predestined black hole of dashed liquification dreams. and while doing so, any tips, pointers, drawings or war stories on making and using the test rigs would be highly appreciated. here's how we're proposing to make it: http://www.gekgasifier.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1496#post1496 this is jay hasty's design, made with common ss plumbing pipe, valves and regulators. to make things easy, this assumes bottled gas at high pressure and correct h2:co ratio. this eliminates the difficult pump and pressure maintaining relief valve. with pressure in the bottle, you can use the tank regulator to set your pressure, and a needle valve and flow meter at the end of the column, pre condensor, to set your flow. an electric heating blanket an insulation will set the temp in the tube bed. the tube reactors can run as either packed bed or slurry modes. this design will do the relatively low temp and pressure FT processes. it will not tolerate the temp and pressures needed for most methanol processes. maybe it will be enough to do some of the hybrid processes for mixed alcohols. or maybe someone will loan us the "holy grail catalyst" with a highly selective single product output, done at tolerable pressures and temps, with good resistance to poisoning, unconcerned with nitrogen, not requiring exotic catalyst support requirements, and with full conversion to liquids in a single pass. if anyone has such a catalyst sitting around the shop, we do encourage you to bring it (as well as yourself) to our next workshop in october. on the main projects at our next workshop will be exploring these gas to liquids pathways. info on the liquids part of the workshop is here: http://www.gekgasifier.com/about/workshop/syngas-to-liquids-workshop/ personally, i find the challenges for realistic small scale liquification to be rather large. much larger than "simply" getting a gasifier/genset to work reasonably at the small scale (after the demo). we can't even convince gtz of that yet, not without reason. while making some mixed liquids is easy as a proof of concept demo, getting the processes to tolerable logistics and economics at the small scale is a highly non-trivial proposition. nonetheless, we going to do a little work to see if there is any hope this problem might yield to the tools and methods available to the reasonably informed junkyard fabricator. any advice or suggestions would be most appreciated. jim -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jim Mason Website: http://www.whatiamupto.com Current Projects: - Gasifier Experimenters Kit (the GEK): http://www.gekgasifier.com - Escape from Berkeley alt fuels vehicle race: www.escapefromberkeley.com - ALL Power Labs on Twitter: http://twitter.com/allpowerlabs - Shipyard Announce list: http://lists.spaceship.com/listinfo.cgi/icp-spaceship.com _______________________________________________ Gasification mailing list [email protected] http://listserv.repp.org/mailman/listinfo/gasification_listserv.repp.org http://gasifiers.bioenergylists.org http://info.bioenergylists.org
