Methanation CO2+4H2→CH4+2H2O discovered by Sabatier more than 100 years ago is an exothermic reaction that proceeds on a Ni-based catalyst. Catalysts with high activity and durability is now available and the research and development are currently shifting to a more practical stage including reactor design for demonstrating a large scale and a highly-efficient methanation process. This study is thus aiming at developing a global reaction model that can be applied for the numerical simulation with a computational fluid dynamics of a methanation reactor. Experiments using a catalyst fixed bed flow reactor were conducted and the rates of methanation reaction were measured under possible conditions happened at entire range of CO2 conversion rates. Power law and Langmuir Hinshelwood models were used to reproduce the experimental results and the rate parameters were determined with minimizing the difference between model calculations and experimental data.
