2008 Volume 34 Issue 1 Pages 108-112
The present study aims at developing a new chemical reactor for forced temperature cycling at a low energy cost. Forced temperature cycling is an attractive mode of chemical reactor operation, since it can achieve higher conversion and selectivity for a variety of chemical reactions than steady-state operations. However, there are only limited number of experimental investigation on the effects of forced temperature cycling on chemical reactions. This is because a large amount of energy is needed to quickly change the reactor temperature. With the reactor developed in this study, only 9 W of electric energy was required to achieve forced temperature cycling. In a sample case of the cycling operation for propylene oxidation, it was demonstrated experimentally that the selectivity and conversion can be controlled by employing the forced temperature cycling.
